


Coefficient of Friction

by ParrNone



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:14:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22660843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParrNone/pseuds/ParrNone
Summary: NEWEST STORY: Ch 5Yaz sometimes fails to think about the consequences of her actions. It's not that she feels invincible, it's just that she sees a someone in trouble, and it's her responsibility to help.The Fam are trying to answer a distress call when Yaz is gravely wounded playing hero.The summary stinks, I know, but that's the gist. Very heavy on the angst. TW: blood, violence.Series of one-shots/short story collections about the Thirteenth Doctor and her Fam. Mostly hurt/comfort, angst, and care-for-you dynamics. I will update chapters as I complete them. Some will be character studies, some will be episode re-writes, some will be standalone snapshots in time.Also, I will try to write the characters as true to form as they appear on the show.
Comments: 34
Kudos: 163





	1. The Woman Who Fell to Earth

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter is a re-visit of 11x01, where Grace takes care of the Doctor post-falling from the sky.

“Seriously, though,” Graham was compelled to ask, “Aliens?”

“Yup.” Simple, straight forward, impossible affirmation from the blonde woman. 

“Oh, yeah, maybe I won’t mention that bit.” He concedes, earning a quick chuckle from Grace beside him. He rolls his eyes at his wife and starts toward the depot, She’s just loving this. 

As Ryan and Grace are watching Graham depart, the woman suddenly drops forward. “Suddenly, I feel…” she seems to admit, “...really tired.” She exhales the last of the sentence, letting the air carry her words away. Her new acquaintances inch closer in concern.

“That was a big fall you had, love. Should get you checked out at A and E.” Grace offers gently. The younger woman had just seemingly fallen from the sky. Disregarding wherever the fall might have begun, it ended with enough force to send her through the roof of a train car. 

The move she makes to place a hand on the young woman’s arm is natural, slow and a commiserating, but as Grace’s fingers hover over the woman’s jacket sleeve, the woman abates, “No-no-no,”   
She waves her hand dismissively, turns her body just enough so that Grace can’t touch her. The pleading glance she flashes towards Grace is followed by a nervous, silly excuse, “I never go anywhere that’s just initials.” The sentence ends with the briefest, fleeting wink and half-hearted half-grin, and a grave exhale as she bends just another degree at the waist.

Oh, Grace thinks, She’s lying. Not accusingly, and not disdainfully, but Grace thinks it all the same. She’s scared. “Well, at least let’s go have a sit down. The flat’s just there…” Grace points at one of the buildings behind her as her voice trails off. 

The woman has taken on a minute tremble, evident in the clench of her jaw. A curtain of blonde hair has fallen forward, obscuring her face. Beside her, Ryan feels compelled to take his hands out of his pockets, and square his stance, something urging him to get ready to catch her. “Nan.” he says quietly, as if Grace did not also have her eyes locked on the woman. They could feel it, deep and primal, that something was wrong. The woman was bent at the waist, hands braced against her knees, eyes scrunched closed, drawing an audible breath through her nose. 

“Love?” Grace asked in a hushed voice, as if she might startle the woman, “What’s happened?”

The woman’s mouth opens but she’s speechless, every muscle still locked and she sways side to side ever so slightly. “It’s alright,” Grace coos, and tentatively takes the woman by the elbow. Grace half-expects the woman to pull away from her, but instead she gives her head a little shake as her vision waxes and wanes. Grace nods her head to her grandson to mirror her actions on the other side. He awkwardly takes her other elbow, and together they guide the woman into a seated position on the sidewalk as Grace soothes, “That’s it, it’s alright, let’s take a moment here and collect ourselves. Catch your breath and we’ll go inside, have some tea.”

“Nan?” Ryan holds up his mobile and points, mouthing, Ambulance? 

Grace looks down at the woman, who is now breathing quite hard, sat on the damp sidewalk, hands gripping the material of her pants. Before Grace could answer, the woman, not looking up to them, forces out through clenched teeth, “Sorry. Went a little funny.” She brings one arm to wrap around her middle.

“You in pain?” Ryan asks, still absently holding his mobile between Grace and himself. 

“It’s like trying to paint metal with water.” She answers, as if it is acceptable.

Ryan now takes on a look of confusion, “Sorry?” 

“Like that. It dries and it dries and it dries, but eventually,” the woman starts clumsily to her feet, “The metal rusts.” Grace has a hold of her elbow again, as she stands unsteadily, nodding to Ryan like what she said made a modicum of sense. “Ah!” she screams, making the other two jump as she brings one hand to her pounding head, the other hugs herself more tightly, “Something’s not right.”

“Love?” Grace asks, and with that the woman suddenly folds into herself. 

“Whoa!” Ryan exclaims as both he and Grace descend with her, controlling her fall to the concrete. Her eyes are closed, and she’s panting for air.

“Come now, Ryan. We need to get her inside.” Grace wastes no time in folding the stranger’s arms across her body and holding her head off the ground as Ryan obediently crouches and gathers her in his arms...

\--- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Grace hurriedly flips on the lights to the dining room, and then to the front room, Ryan following as she went. She nods to the sofa, “Let’s get her down.” Ryan obeys, trying with all his might not to trip or bump into anything. He does his best to remain fluid and coordinated as he lowers the woman’s body onto the cushions. “Gentle, love, that’s it.” Grace is immediately knelt beside the sofa, taking the woman’s face in her hands, “Ryan, go and bring me my work bag. The big green one, in the linen cupboard.” 

Ryan nods, “Yeah.” and he makes his way to the stairs.

“Alright, alright,” Grace leans closer to the incoherent woman, “Let’s have a proper look at you.” 

Grace takes a wrist in her hand and feels for a pulse. As she waits, her brow furrows. At first, she thinks the woman is extremely tachycardic, her heart racing so fast there’s no discernible pauses between beats, but after a few seconds she counts 1-2-3-4...1-2-3-4...But that can’t be right. Some sort of arrhythmia? 

The woman’s eyes are closed, but she is in no way relaxed; her brow is furrowed and creased, obviously uncomfortable, and her limbs are still rigid and engaged. She breathes harshly and loudly through her nose, making soft sounds of distress every moment or so. In the soft light of the nearby lamp, the first thing Grace notes is the stiff, dark section of hair behind her ear that she had not yet noticed. She turns the woman’s head and parts the blond hair to reveal a ragged laceration, the length of her little finger. Probably from the train car, Grace deems, gently approximating the wound edges with her fingertips. It’s not actively bleeding now, but it does go through all the layers of skin. Looking now more carefully, there’s dried clots of blood matting down several locks of hair, as well as some blood dried inside the woman’s ear canal, just noticeable from Grace’s angle. Her worry deepens, unsure if the residue was just runoff from the head wound, or its own injury entirely. The woman whimpers as Grace carefully runs her fingers through the rest of her hair, and Grace reassures, “Hush now, it’s alright. This’ll be quick.”

As she works, she talks softly, “Pet, I’m going to take this coat off you, alright?” Though the woman does not respond, Grace is not convinced she’s totally unconscious, and it soothes her mind to talk to the young woman. Grace carefully tugs the cuff of one sleeve, and it dawns on her how oddly dressed the stranger is. With all the excitement of the night, Grace has yet to appreciate that the woman is in a men’s suit. This day in age, the older woman excuses, men and women’s clothes were hardly discernible. That was not the odd thing. The odd thing was that the suit was obviously not designed for her, there was simply too much material; it was cut to fit, if not a man, than someone at least much taller. Aside from the size of the clothes, they looked like they had been lifted off a vagrant--covered in dust and filth, with numerous tears, ripped stitching, charred lapels, and missing buttons. “Well these clothes have certainly seen battle, haven’t they, dear?” Grace jests with the unresponsive woman. The sleeve of the coat alone was folded several times over, and it was loose, and slid off her arm with ease. 

By the time Grace had moved on to the second arm, Ryan had returned. He deposited a heavy, green duffel beside his nan as she directed him, “Can you lift her a bit there, love? Gentle. Support her head a bit. That’s it.” She tugged the coat from underneath the body as her grandson tenuously lifted her torso several inches. 

Grace unceremoniously tosses the filthy coat onto a nearby chair. She wastes no time, beginning on the buttons of the vest and Ryan leans back, dancing from one foot to the other as he stutters, “Oh are you gonna, you know, I’ll just--yeah, Nan, you know what, I’ll just start my online stuff, yeah?” and he awkwardly, and hurriedly, scuttles to the kitchen, swiping his tablet from the dining table as he ducked around the wall. The older woman just nods as he dismisses himself in a panic, too busy with the task at hand. She talks to the woman, “Love, if you can hear me, I’m undoing your top, so I can take a look at you.” Grace isn’t sure if it is a response to her ministrations, or just unconscious babble, but the woman lets out a low groan. 

The vest is undone and before Grace can begin on the buttons of the shirt, she notices a rip in the left side of the vest. She catches her breath as she lifts the lapel away and reveals a dark stain on the white shirt beneath. “Oh, love,” Grace admonishes, and quickly undoes the buttons of the shirt. Attempting to peel back the shirt front is easier planned than done, as the dried blood is effectively gluing the material to the woman’s abdomen, and she groans again in protest, her head turning minutely from side to side, “Easy now, it’s alright.” Grace notices the woman has on no brassier, so after a quick scan for obvious injury, she carefully lays the upper shirt to maintain the woman’s modesty, and folds the lower portion of the left half of the shirt out of the way, displaying a wicked laceration which traverses from the point of her sternum, downward across her ribs, and ends where her ribs do. Unlike her head wound, aside from being much bigger, this one is weeping small amounts of blood and exudate. 

“Oh, dear,” Grace says quietly, “Stay put, all gonna be fine, I’ll be back in a tick.” And then she’s up and headed to the kitchen. 

Ryan is sitting on the counter, fiddling with his iPad. He looks up expectantly as his grandmother enters, heading straight to the sink to wash her hands, “She okay, Nan?” 

“A little worse for wear, I’m afraid.”

“I know she said no A and E, but are you sure?”

Grace dries her hands on a dishtowel and looks at him up and down, “What have I said about sitting on the counter? You want me to make your dinner off the seat of your trousers?”

He rolls his eyes and hops down, “Seriously?”

“She said no A and E. For now, I think it best we respect that.” and with that Grace returns to the front room, kneeling once again by the sofa.

She shuffles through the bag beside her, the one Ryan had fetched a few moments before. It wasn’t the most complete trauma bag in the world as it was her spare, the other -- her main bag-- was still in her locker at work, but this one would have to do. She finds a packet of nitrile gloves and dons them, talking to the body before her as she works, “Hiya, love, I think you could do with a bit of a pick-me-up, so I’m gonna give you some fluids, okay?” Grace produces a butterfly needle, tubing, and a bag of saline from her kit. “Sharp scratch,” she warns, introducing the needle easily into the dorsum of the woman’s hand. The woman doesn’t react, and Grace continues, taping the cannula into place, connecting the tubing and saline, and hanging the bag from the lamp beside them. Thinking on the inadequacies of her trauma kit, she wishes she had some antibiotics and opiates on hand, but alas, they would have to make due with the poor man’s pharmacy: paracetamol and prayer.

“You’ve got a nasty cut here I’m going to clean up.” Grace opens a packet of antimicrobial wipes, and as gently as adequacy will allow, starts lightly scrubbing around the wound. “Hmm.” the woman groans softly, and Grace begins to see why. Under the crusts of dried blood along her ribcage, as the older woman’s cleaning slowly reveals, is a dark, inky bruise painting a starry night sky across unnaturally pale skin. Broken ribs. Grace makes a grim face and firmly presses down on the woman’s sternum. “Hmmughh!” She groans loudly. Very broken ribs. 

Following the final groan, Grace notices a change in breathing. Or was it a change? Had she always been exhaling that forcefully, inhaling that tremulously? Grace digs a stethoscope from her kit. It’s old, discolored from years of use, hence its being downgraded to the backup kit, but it still worked. “I’m just gonna have a listen to you.” and she listens to the woman’s breathing, which is course and somewhat wheezy, and she wasn’t moving air very well on her left side. Worrisome, but nothing she could do; Grace drew a mental line at performing a thoracostomy on a stranger in her front room.   
Now sat there with the stethoscope, the older woman gives pause, moving the diaphragm of the stethoscope to the young woman’s heart. She listens, withdraws her hand in shock, and listens again. Lub-dub, lub-dub, as the heart does, squeeze-fill, squeeze-fill, but wrong, too close together, one lub almost overlapping another lub, no dub in between. It was almost like listening to two separate circulatory systems at once. Her stethoscope was old, but it wasn’t such a renegade to produce the sound of concurrent heartbeats. Grace momentarily presses the diaphragm to her own chest, to make sure it wasn’t malfunctioning, and then back to the blonde woman’s. What the…

“Hell, what happened?!” Yasmin Khan exclaimed, standing at the stranger’s feet. Grace had been so hyper focused on what she was doing, she hadn’t heard the young officer knocking on the front door. Ryan had been the one to rush by, his eyes semi-averted from his grandmother and her patient, tripping over his own two feet before stumbling to open the door to let Yaz in. 

“She collapsed outside,” Grace answered, “She said she wasn’t feeling well, refused to go to hospital, and then she just went over.”

Yasmin’s eyes were wide with disbelief at the scene in front of her, “Well, too bad. Look, I know tonight has been weird beyond belief, and I’m not sure what her...deal is, but she’s hurt. Hospital is obviously where she needs to be.” 

“I wasn’t totally convinced either, until just now.” Grace brandishes the stethoscope, “She’s got two seperate pulses. Whatever she is, I think she’s safer here.”

Yasmin looks thoughtful for a moment, before conceding. “Okay. Do you need help?” 

“Actually, yes. I imagine Ryan won’t be up for it.” Grace says, and directs Yasmin to kneel at the head of the sofa. 

Grace starts undoing the woman’s belt buckle. Yasmin frowns, “What are we doing?” 

Grace doesn’t need to unbutton the trousers themselves, as they are too big, and without the belt they have nothing convincing them to stay in place. “She’s in a bad way, and I only have so many supplies. If she’s bleeding somewhere else, we’re gonna need a plan ‘B’.” She unlaces the heavy boots, tugs them off her feet--a single tug does it, as the boots are much too big for her--and loudly drops them to the floor. “Love, I’m going to look at your legs right quick.” She only has two preloaded syringes of lidocaine. That was it. That was maybe, maybe, enough for the wound on her side and the one on her head. Maybe not even enough for the one on her head, and if that were the case, suturing that wound was going to be extremely unpleasant, but the laceration on her chest was going to take precedence, as it would be impossible to close without some sort of analgesia--even if the woman stayed unconscious throughout the procedure, it would be relatively unbearable once she woke up.

She draws down the trousers as gently and as quickly as she could. Strange, Grace thinks, because the blonde woman is wearing men’s boxer briefs. Again, she dismisses the oddity and looks over the woman’s legs. She was bruised to high heaven, and she sported a large scrape along her hip and left thigh, but otherwise there were no major red flags. Grace passed an antimicrobial wipe over the abrasion, and, with Yasmin’s help, scrunched her trousers back on. 

“Everything going alright?” it’s Graham’s voice hollering from the foyer. He must’ve just gotten home. It occurs to Grace that Ryan must have not escaped back to the kitchen when he let Yasmin in, so he had been just waiting by the front door. She assumed he filled Graham in on what was happening. 

“We’re working on it.” Grace hollers back, now miming to Yasmin to help lift the blonde into a sitting position, saying in a quieter voice, “I need to check her back.” 

As Grace and Yasmin were coordinating the careful lift, Graham yelled again, “So, uh, Ryan and I will just wait here, shall we?” They were trapped standing in the foyer while the blonde was indisposed. Graham did not want to be in the way or out of line, but it had been the night from hell, he was hungry, and he also wasn’t terribly content standing in silence with the step-grandson who didn’t particularly sing his praises. 

Grace notes the bruising littering the blonde’s back, then re-wraps her in the shirt and Yasmin cautiously lays her back down. 

“Go on now to the kitchen,” Grace calls to her family. As the men scurry through in the background she opens a disposable packet containing an iodine-soaked sponge. She says quietly to Yasmin, “She’s going to feel this bit.” 

Without direction, PC Khan gently places a hand on either of the woman’s shoulders in anticipation. Then, harder than Yasmin would have ever assumed, Grace began scrubbing the wound with the sponge. It doesn’t take long for the blonde to react; she begins unconsciously to twist away from the fire the iodine brings, her breath catching against the new pressure on her broken bones.   
Yasmin holds her firmly in place as Grace soothes, “It’s okay, love. I know, I know it stings. But it won’t last long. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to clean it.

“I’ve got some numbing medicine here. You’re going to feel a prick and a burn, first.” Grace uncaps one of the preloaded syringes, and starts administering the lidocaine along the edges of the wound.   
The stranger’s breath hitches as she works, groan transforming into a growl of discomfort. 

The nurse’s features become everso more serious, discarding the now-empty syringe and uncapping the second. Her guesstimations had been off, and now she was certain she would not have enough lidocaine to finish her work. 

“Ugh.” Yasmin can’t help but exasperate. Her rudimentary Emergency Response training had in no way prepared her to watch anything like Grace beginning to suture the stranger’s ribcage closed--like her mother had done her name badges to her uniforms. “Will-uh-will she be okay?” she asks, not trying to distract Grace, but she needed to do something for fear of being sick.  
Grace’s concentration is incorrigible, her gloved fingers nimbly moving the curved needle through flesh, not looking up from her work, “I hope so. We’ll know more once she’s awake.”

She finishes her work in relative silence. She and Yaz switch places, and Yaz rebuttons the woman’s shirt while Grace irrigates the wound behind her ear. The older woman asks as she opens a new needle and suture, “Yasmin, love, have the boys be useful and make some tea. And grab some ice from the freezer, wrap it in the flannel by the sink.” 

The police officer stands and heads to the kitchen. Grace hums softly as she works, sewing together the back of the stranger’s head.   
Yasmin returns with a handful of ice, wrapped in a small towel. The nurse directs her to lay it over the woman’s ribs. 

By the time Grace finishes her stitches, Graham and Ryan emerge from the kitchen together. Graham carried a tray of tea and accouterments, Ryan still held his tablet. Graham asks as he set the tray down, “Well?” 

Yaz takes a blanket from the back of the couch and instinctively draped it over the still body. Grace sighed, “Patience, love.” She moves to lift one of the woman’s eyelids, and pauses.   
Almost in synchrony, they hold their breath as the woman on the couch begins to emit a muted, golden glow. The ethereal light dances against her skin, sloughing and casting soft swirls of yellow into the air around her. The stranger inhales a little deeper, and exhales heavily, an aurate sphere comes from her mouth and dissipates in the air. 

They wait, tense and expectantly for several pregnant seconds, but nothing happens. Graham visibly relaxes, and mutters, “Seriously?”


	2. Caliber of Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The TARDIS lands on a peaceful new planet and refuses to move. The Doctor and gang soon realize something is not as it should be, and attempt to set things right. After an act to protect her companions, Graham, Ryan and Yaz find themselves having to save her, too. Mentions of blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had originally posted this to fanfic.net, but decided to add it here (I'm new to this platform). It is it's own stand alone story, but it fits the genre of this collection, so I figured it would be fine as a chapter here. I hope you enjoy!

DAY 2: MORNING

“It’s nothing,” she said, clenching her jaw and catching his wrist.

“Seriously, Doc--” he advances his arm another inch or so until she increased her resistance against him.

“I said it’s nothing.” she hissed. They were talking in teethy whispers, and the Doctor continually flicked her eyes to over Graham’s shoulder, reassuring herself that Yaz and Ryan were not listening.   
She met Graham’s pleading glare again, and implored him, “Just for now, it has to be nothing. Please.” 

The older man let his eyes flit over the front of the Doctor’s coat, his hand still being stalled by hers, only inches from the lapel. She stood very awkwardly, her hips back and leaning forward ever-so-slightly. He had only just noticed the slightly deeper breaths she had started to take. In all of their travels to date, running had never been a problem of hers, but the past hour of sprinting for their lives had the Doctor behind all of them, in Graham’s usual position, breathing hard, speaking less.

Graham was not sure if the younger ones had noticed the Doctor’s strange behavior since the attack at the temple, but he had. He kept replaying the memory of her body being thrown over the stone landing; though he remembered her bouncing back up with hardly amiss breath. He knew she did not sleep last night, but that was hardly out of character, since he had never seen her sleep before. When they risked taking breaks, she would stand still, and that was weird, since she usually paced in a line or small circle.

He murmured, “I’m not letting this go.”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY 1: MORNING

The TARDIS had landed and refused to move. 

“You know good and well this is not Captiva Copernicus,” the Doctor had muttered, interpreting the screen above the console. “And here I was, thinking you’d enjoy a power wash from the Iotee tribe.” 

“Are you blackmailing the TARDIS?” Yaz asked gently, but with a smile.

“I was aiming for ‘bribery’.” The Doctor shrugged and tried, unsuccessfully, to get them to dematerialize. The machine responded with an angry wheeze, and the console screen blinked off. 

“So where are we then?” Graham asked, resigned to knowing if the Tardis did not want to go, they were damn well stuck until it changed its mind. 

“Rospera, roughly translated,” she fiddled with another screen, “Rather tranquil, some very exciting species of flora. An indigenous arboreal species of fauna called Sapilin, somewhat primitive, but very amazing. Kind, naturalistic tree-people, more or less. Never met them myself, but they’re known for their gentle nature, very similar to to Ood, though less...codependent shall we say,” Ryan and Yaz exchange a confused look and mouth ‘Ood’ to each other as she continues, “Only twenty-sixth century. Hm, nothing really looks out of order.”

“Oh, yeah, fantastic. That’s always reassuring, innit?” Graham rolled his eyes and crossed his arms, “We’re in the botanical gardens from hell, aren’t we?”

Yaz spiritedly shook her head, “No, remember on Paladima when the Tardis stalled so we could see those fireworks over the canals? That was amazin’.”

Ryan interjected, “Won’t know ‘til we have a look round, won’t we?” 

“That’s the spirit!” the Doctor beamed. “Oh, very exciting. Terrestrial nav says there’s some Obsidian temples north of here. A day’s hike. Obsidian the deity, not the rock. Very popular religion in this galaxy. I can tell you the canonization while we walk.” 

“I think a hike sounds lovely,” Yaz nodded. 

Ryan had moved towards the doors as the Doctor spoke, and opened one. He grinned as he stuck his head out, jaw dropping, letting the door fall open, “Now that is proper mad!”

Beyond to door of ship was an expanse of blue, green, and silvery forest; thick trees so tall they were touching the pink, cloudless sky. The dozen meters or so between the rocky surface the TARDIS had landed on and the tree line was an ocean of leaves. Not ground littered in downed leaves, no, an actual, rustling, swaying body of foliage that stretched beyond the eye’s view from left to right, and was producing a sound akin to babbling water.

The Doctor joined Ryan in his awe, briefly sonicing the foliage-river, “Neat. Only six centimeters deep, we can walk through it I should think. Temple’s that way.” She pointed haphazardly to a section of silvery-blue trees, and then calls over her shoulder, grinning from ear to ear, “Best pack a bag, let’s go camping!”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY 1: AFTERNOON

The hike had been completely enjoyable, though, to Graham’s dismay was about eight hours long. They stopped occasionally to enjoy the scenery; most memorable was a clearing of the most peculiar field of silver flowers, slightly metallic and stiff which creaked as they swayed in the breeze; another was another river of leaves, deeper and with a harsher current to where they had left the ship, uncrossable and fed by a monstrous wooden dam; and another was a fountain, similar to a geyser, which continuously spouted a shower of gleaming sand as opposed to water. The geyser made a sound similar to music, as the course grey sand showered down on the surrounding earth. “Is that metal too?” Yaz had asked, trying to categorize the sound the laminate-looking sand was making. The Doctor, like she had done with the flowers, pointed her sonic at the phenomenon and interpreted the reading, “Bits are. It’s naturally occuring, trying to purge the pressure the ore makes as it moves under the crust. Must be what moves the foliage like water, too. Magnificent, yeah?”

“That’s not natural though, is it?” Ryan was turned around and looking up. Several meters away there was, for lack of a better term, a treehouse, a couple of stories off the ground and wrapped around the trunk on a thick blue-green tree. The circular fort glints in the sunshine coming through the branches above, it is constructed out of metal. “Thought you said the natives were naturalists, only use rocks and sticks and stuff. Who managed that?”

“That, Ryan,” the Doctor stood beside him, “is an excellent question. Come on, gang.”

They made for the metal ladder at the trunk, leading up to the platform. Graham shook his head, “Ain’t no good gonna come out of this, mark my words.”

“Oh, don’t be such a downer, Graham!” the Doctor calls as she ascends the ladder. 

Graham calls up to her as he queues being his grandson, “Mysterious steel house on a planet supposed to just have stone igloos, where the TARDIS forced us to snoop around? I ain’t being a downer, Doc, I’m being rational.”

Once inside, other than the view the vantage point made of the rest of the forest, the treehouse was rather unimpressive. The view from the platform revealed a landscape of trees dabbling out the pink light from the three suns in the sky, the leaf-river winding its way to nearly the base of the treehouse and then out of site, another sand-geyser off the the horizon. The treehouse itself was bare and blank. The structure wrapped entirely around the trunk of the tree was built on, the trunk ran through the center of what was almost an empty room, circumvented by a column of metal, so no wood was visible. There is no door, only a door frame, and no glass in the windows that are spaced several feet apart, all the way around the room, giving the feeling of almost being open. There is a metal desk without a chair, and a couple of shelves, otherwise the treehouse is bare. On the shelves are two things: a small notebook, made of impossibly thin sheets of metal foil rather than paper, and a small pry bar that is about twelve inches long. 

Yaz is the one who picks up the notebook, and flips through its shiny pages. She couldn’t make out some of the writing, which seemed etched into the pages, a lot of it was diagrams and single, disjointed sentences about frequencies, oscillations, sediment, and prayer. 

The Doctor was busy inspecting the column that ran from ceiling to floor, a large rectangle was engraved into it at one point, “Hm. Interesting.” She trails her fingers down the panel.  
Ryan appears next to her, holding the pry-bar. He shows it to her, “Context clue, maybe?”

“Another brilliant job, well done,” she beams and steps back so he can jam the bar into the seam of the panel and pop it out of place. Doing so reveals a complex series of circuits, wires, and turned-off lights integrated into the trunk of the tree. The Doctor is immediately using her sonic, “It’s a generator of sorts. Built out of parts of a ship. In fact, the whole treehouse is scraps of a ship.”

“Generator for what? There’s no lights or anything around here,” Graham points out. 

“Does this help?” Yaz turns over the notebook to the Doctor, who flips through it quickly.

“It’s mostly specs on building the generator. It’s supposed to disrupt EMF waves.”

“There’s letters, too,” Yaz indicates, “To someone named...I think it’s pronounced Venarill? Signed from Ravanac.”

“What’s he say?” Ryan asks.

“Mostly apologies,” the Doctor says, thumbing through the pages, “Seems like Ravanac wasn’t here on purpose.” She starts reading one out loud:

“Dearest Venarill, I regret these words, even though I have no way of getting them to you. I was trapped in the gravitational pull while passing by, I don’t even know the name of the planet. The Mentague wasn’t designed for the landing she took, and I see her destroyed. I hate to think of the impact of such a simple accident; the rations will never reach Edityne, all of our hard work gone; you will never know what happened; Geratous and Blethamine will know me only in stories. I’m sorry. Kiss the children for me.” the Doctor pauses, swallows hard, and flips to another letter, 

“Dearest Venarill, I think the consequence of my misfortune are greater than assumed. This place is delicate, was was was delicate. I think the nuclear core from the Mentague has disturbed the balance. How, through a fault of the universe, is it that I feel guilt? But still…Kiss the children.

“Dearest Venarill, I will fix this. If not Edityne, I will fix this nameless rock. I will use the salvageable engines. It’s doable. I just need some time, and that, my dearest, I find myself with an abundance of. Kiss the children.”

The Doctor pauses again and skims through the letters, between the pages of nonsensical notes. “He starts to make less and less sense. Or there are missing pages? Or madness? Here’s the last entry:

“Dearest Venarill, I go. Fate or forgiveness, one happens sooner than the other. Kiss the children.”

The group is quiet, uneasy as she closes the notebook. Graham offers, “Maybe the bloke’s here somewhere, we can take him home.”

The Doctor gives a solemn headshake, “The letters are dated, almost half a century ago. Edityne was a humanoid colony in the twenty-fifth century, they don’t exist in the twenty-sixth. Whatever happened to Ravanac, I’m afraid it happened a long time ago.”

“Then why did the TARDIS leave us here?” Yaz asks incredulously.

“I don’t know yet, but I suspect we will soon.” she reassures, then recounts what they know, “Okay, so a seemingly random shuttle operator accidently crash lands on a primeval planet, the   
components of his engine damage the ecosystem somehow with undisclosed results, he goes mad and lives out his final days trying to remedy it, and some portion of that solution involves him building this generator, which doesn’t work, to do...something. Alright, everything is so clear.”

Graham pulls a face, “Yep, crystal, I am so attuned to what is going on.”

“That’s the spirit!” she pockets the notebook and claps Graham on the shoulder as she heads for the door. 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY 1: EVENING

The Obsidian temple was nothing short of breathtaking. Grey-purple stones of various sizes were intricately stacked to create a rough pyramid shape, the size of a football pitch, towering and tapering to a point nearly four stories high. The stones had random latticeworks of vines clinging to their seams. The setting suns cast a wide net of blues, oranges, pinks, bouncing off the slightly iridescent structure, bathing the field it was built on in a pool of rainbows. 

“Alright,” Ryan is the first to speak, “That’s ace.”

“Can we go up it?” Yaz asks. 

“Yes, Obsidian is a very welcoming creed. Visitors encouraged.” the Doctor answers.

Graham immediately takes off his backpack and sets it at the base of the nearest tree. Ryan asks him why he did so. “I ain’t about to climb a million stairs with an exercise weight, am I?”

Everyone laughs, and agrees, the Doctor even takes of her coat and lays it atop her pack after fishing the sonic screwdriver from its pocket and tucking it into the pocket of her trousers.

They approach and start up the asymmetrical steps. The Doctor stops, while the others continue their climb as she studies the interloping vines along the steps. She scrunches her eyebrows and says to herself, “Weird. These are a different material than what’s in the trees.” As she starts rummaging for her Sonic, she hears Yaz scream, “Doctor!”

She doesn’t get the chance to turn around because suddenly a section of vine has lifted off the stones and has wrapped around her ankle. In a swift motion the sentient rope snaps her up in the air and easily tosses her several steps below. Once she stops rolling she looks first ahead of her to see her companions rushing towards her, then behind her to see the vines coiled on the steps below start to writhe and raise and ascend. She scrambles to her feet and hollers to the others, “No, up, up, up!”

The gang, seeing she is okay and the coalition of creepers start to come alive on the steps below, turn and start to race up the steps; the Doctor follows. Glancing backwards she notices the vines start to coalesce, and roughly form bodies, able to take the stairs without traditional steps--no, not like a biped, but rather form one leg in front of the other in rapid succession. They’re big, coiled tendrils of vines, dressed in ivy, with cobbled, gnarled faces, which make quick, creaky, serpentine movements. There’s more than a dozen of them in almost an instant. Several extend arm-like limbs, draped in vines and metallic moss, letting their tapered and razor sharp projections sweep after the Doctor and her mates with incredible strength.. They miss, and crash into the stone steps, knocking some loose and shattering some entirely.

“I thought you said they were peaceful!” Graham huffs as the Doctor catches up with him first.

The Doctor has her Sonic pointed behind her as the runs, “Something’s wrong!”

“Oh, really?!”

She deciphers the sonic’s readings as they reach the plateau of the temple, a grand pavilion littered with more iridescent stones, some as big as cars, all arranged in some sort of significant set of circles. “Aha, gotcha! Shouldn’t do wood, but the wood here is funny. Got bits of ore in it,” she reads the screwdriver and then beckons the others, “Here, quickly!” 

“Okay, I know what the letters were saying!” The Doctor whispers loudly as they all huddle behind a purplish boulder, “The core of Ravanac’s engine must have broken apart in the atmosphere and scattered across the planet. It must have interrupted the magnetic fields that the flowing ore creates under the surface of the planet’s crust. The Sapilin’s are very intuned with those fields, like birds, or butterflies. The disruption changed their behaviour, they became cruel and territorial. Ravanac noticed the change and wanted to correct it, to help someone if it was the last thing he did, but it was impossible for him to gather the chunks of engine core that were embedded everywhere. So,” she excitedly taps the foil notebook, “He built the generator to emit a signal that would correct the disruption. BUT, the generator didn’t have enough power.”

“So if we find a way to charge the generator and turn it on, the monsters will become peaceful?” Ryan asks. 

“Thumbs up to Ryan Sinclair,” the Doctor beams, “A little radiation boost from the TARDIS and the generator is good to go! The elemental core will eventually degrade so that the generator isn’t necessary, but it could take another millenium. So, fam, plan--Oh, Fam Plan, that sounds brilliant!”

“Doctor,” Yaz urges, peeking over the boulder to the sound of approaching cracking and rustling.

“Right, sorry, plan: I’ll distract our guests, you all run down the south steps, I’ll meet you by our bags. Then we’ll leg it to the TARDIS, turn up the radiation, pop back to the treehouse, turn on the generator, and the Sapilins get to go back to normal.”

“Distract them how?” Yaz asks.

The Doctor grins, “Like so,” and hops up from her crouched position, “Oi! Jeepers creepers!” she shouts and starts sprinting into the shadows of the pavillion. 

“Doctor, no!” Yaz squeaks, but it’s too late, she’s out of site and a stampede of Sapilins rush by. 

“Come on,” Graham orders, “Just do what she says.” He hoists himself up and off they go. 

Back through the pavillion and down the countless steps, across the grey-grass field until they are at the base of the tree where their belongings rest. The trio shuffle their packs back on as they catch their breath. 

Graham picks up the Doctor’s coat and bag, ready to hand it to her when she appears.

After a moment or so in the undramatic quiet, Yaz asks, “Think she’s alright?” 

A single, feminine, far away scream answered her. 

Ryan, Yaz and Graham wordlessly take off back towards the temple. They’re almost at its base when the Doctor apparates from the other side of the building, quickly slinking towards them along the wall, “What did I say? Get to the woods.”

They turn and start to jog as Ryan says, “We heard you scream.”

“Victory screech,” the Doctor huffs, yanking her coat from Graham and pulling it on as they moved. She then takes her backpack and dons it. Graham can’t help but notice a change in her face as she pulls on the straps. She draws the corners of her mouth back and blinks a few times too many.

“You’re alright then?” Graham asks, suspiciously. 

“Never better, now let’s run for our lives, yeah?” she grits as she marches forward.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY 2: AFTERNOON

“Gah!” the Doctor exclaimed quietly, dropping fluidly to one knee. 

Yaz, being the closest to her, rounded about and knelt beside her, “What is it? What’s wrong?” She automatically threw an arm around the Doctor and glanced backwards into the darkness, the sound of snapping and crunching of trees and foliage growing louder, quicker, closer.

The Doctor grabbed onto her companion, “Running stitch,” she huffed and hauled herself up with Yaz’s help. 

Yaz steadied her a little, noting that she was dripping in sweat, “Doctor, please.” 

“The TARDIS is just up ahead,” the Doctor says pointedly. Graham and Ryan were now beside them, having doubled back when they noticed the women had stopped. 

“I hate it when those stitches come on,” Graham says with a weird cheeriness. He comes around to the Doctor’s other side, “Reminds me of my age. Here, best walk it out,” He takes the Doctor’s arm and nods for Yaz and Ryan to continue. They younger pair cautiously turn and start to power walk towards the sound of the leaf-river. 

The Doctor gives Graham a confused look, who shakes his head and whispers, “Strike two, Doc.”

The Doctor waits a moment before forcing a smile, “Have I ever told you I invented American baseball?” She gently takes her arm from his and takes a step ahead. In the dappled light from the trees he makes out thick red wheal of swollen skin on the back of her neck, disappearing beneath her coat collar. He says nothing. 

“Uh, we’ve got a problem,” Ryan announces as he crosses the treeline, into the clearing where the TARDIS should be, “It’s not here.”

Instead, the river of leaves that had been a simple creek yesterday, was now roaring and churning, all the way to the cliff’s edge that had been just a landing of rock previously. 

“No, no, no,” the Doctor mumbles in disbelief, producing her screwdriver and surveying the river, “The dam must’ve opened, flooded the river. The TARDIS got swept away. Oh, she’ll be miles away now. Hold on, I installed a bit of sat-nav since the Desolation fiasco.” The Doctor puts her hand on her forehead in frustration as she reads the screwdriver, “Yeah, the TARDIS is another five miles away, swept to a ravine. We’ll have to find a way round this, and then hike. The ravine means a bit of a cliff climb, too,” she glances at Ryan, who she knew would be most uncomfortable with the idea, who made a disappointed face, “I’d really rather not”. 

Behind them there is a snapping sound that causes them all to turn and stare into the daunting darkness. Emerging from the background of beautiful trees and shrubs are a dozen of anthropomorphic forms, consisting of creepers and vines and hollowed spaces for eyes. 

“What now?” Yaz asks through gritted teeth as they all back up to the bank of the river, “Should we try and swim?”

“Wait a minute,” the Doctor says, noticing the Sapilins stop advancing. They’re just a few meters off, inclining their gnarled heads from side to side. In fact, they were moving back a little bit. The Doctor realizes, “The river, they don’t like the river. Must be something to do with the ore.”

The creatures had retreated enough so that they were barely visible. The tension of the moment eased minutely. The Doctor exclaims, “Of course, the ore beneath the river repulses them! That’s how Ravanac stayed safe in the treehouse, the river runs right by it!” 

“Okay, plan revision,” the Doctor looks from face to face, “Yaz and Ryan, go back to the treehouse, follow the river, be careful. Graham and I will go to the TARDIS and turn on the radiation field. The TARDIS is too far from the generator now, but if we turn it on when the suns rise we should be okay. When you see the blue light from the TARDIS in the sky, that’s your signal, turn on the generator. Just toggle the green button on the panel.” 

“Why sunrise?” Yaz questions.

“That’s when the planet should be close enough to the suns to boost the signal. Have you noticed it hottest at dawn and dusk? Rospera doesn’t rotate on its axis to create day and night, it has three very uniquely positioned suns, which affect electromagnetic waves. We are closest to the suns at dawn and dusk, that’s when their influence is the strongest. Wouldn’t be a problem if the TARDIS hadn’t drifted away, but alas,” she gestures to the river. “Okay, remember, see the signal, flip the switch. If we miss the time frame, the signal won’t be strong enough and the generator won’t power on. No big deal, but then we’ll have to wait until the suns set.”

Ryan offers Graham a fist-bump, “Don’t let the killer trees get ya, gramps.” 

“And you two be careful.” Graham responds. 

“Best of luck,” the Doctor tells the younger pair, before turning and beckoning Graham to follow...

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY 2: NIGHTTIME

“We can camp here for the night,” Graham suggests carefully, seeing the disagreement on the Doctor’s face, “We can’t reach the TARDIS until the first sun comes up anyway, the cliff is too dangerous. And the Sapilins are too freaked out by the leaf-Niagra Falls thing to get any closer.” He’s reluctant to offer stopping, but she had fallen behind him considerably. They had stopped jogging, and to instead hiking at an awkward fast-paced walk, to what was now nearly a stagger; and Graham had started to pull ahead, so much so that he would occasionally lose sight of her behind brush and trees when he glanced over his shoulder. He had also noticed she had started breathing a little louder.

She shakes her head, somewhat breathless, ““We miss flipping the switch by the tertiary sunrise, we have to wait until sunset, the farther the TARDIS drift downstream, we risk it falling out of range. What’dya reckon Ryan and Yaz will think, anyway?” ” 

“I don’t like it either, but they’re safe at the treehouse and they know to stay put. And they know that they might have to wait until tomorrow night anyway. I think it’s better if we rest.”

She takes a deep, poignant breath through her nose, placing her hands very slowly on her hips and bowing her head, “Nonsense. We can make it now.”

Graham scratched his head, “Doc, seriously. You don’t want to admit that there’s something up with you, fine. But I am telling you it is not safe to keep at it right now.”

She doesn’t respond, only hangs her head further. In the bright grey bath of the moonlight, the Doctor starts to sway. “Doc?” Graham instinctively moves closer, his hands come out of his pockets and one hovers behind her.

“It’s just a little while,” she mutters, but it’s as if it’s to herself, soft and personal. She leans forward now, still minutely swaying.

“Doc? What’s the matter?” Graham says rather loudly.

“It’s just...just...ugh,” her voice trails off and ends in a heavy shudder, and suddenly her body goes lax and she drops to the forest floor. 

Her companion exclaims a sound of horror as he watches her fall. He manages to trap her shoulders in his waiting hands, and awkwardly sits her down, rather than letting her fall uncontrolled, “Easy, now.”

She sits with her legs out in front of her, her hands bracing the earth on either side, keeping her upright. She lets out a terrible groan and shakes her head, as if trying to clear her mind.   
Graham, crouches beside her, trying to capture her attention, “Alright, Doctor, that’s enough. What’s the matter?”

“I...don’t feel very well,” she admits through gritted teeth.

He tried to soften his features as he leans in a tad closer, “Okay, what’s going on? I ain’t much, but I can try to help.”

The Doctor still mumbles with her face down, eyes scrunched together, “Safe at the treehouse…”

It is now Graham notices that her yellow braces are not over her shoulders, but instead are hanging down around her legs, still attached to the waistband of her trousers. He instinctively stands and tentatively sticks his index finger down the back of the Doctor’s shirt collar. Almost apologetically, he pulls it back enough to reveal the scabbed welt running down from the nape of her neck he had gotten glimpses of earlier. He can’t see much other than the welt disappearing in the darkness between her shirt and her back, but she hisses a little, and leans away from his touch. Graham confirms unnecessarily, “You’re hurt.”

“It’s not bad.” the Doctor admonishes quietly.

“Sure, apart from you not being able to stand.” He retorts, “I knew you wasn’t right. Why didn’t you say anything? You should ‘ave stayed with the kids.”

“I said it’s nothing.” There is no fire in her voice, it’s like someone has flipped a switch. Graham acknowledges that she had been acting strangely since the temple, reserved and quiet, but now suddenly she seems far away, barely committed to pretending everything is okay. She isn’t even looking at him, but rather blinking a little more than necessary, as if unable to focus her eyes. She’s pale, even in the moonlight, she’s not the correct hue; beads of sweat are collecting on her nose; and she still sways lightly even though she’s sitting. She says sadly, “They didn’t mean it.”

“Didn’t mean what?” he presses.

“They’re confused...minds poisoned by the magnetic shift...Didn’t mean to hit me.”

Graham considerately presses a palm to her forehead, causing some of her blonde fringe to stick to the sweat. “Doc, I think I need to have a look at ya.” He says seriously, moving his hand to the Doctor’s knee, trying to convey the brevity of their situation, willing her to try her hand at being honest. 

The Doctor finally makes eye contact with him. She gives an almost unperceivable nod and drops her gaze again as she whispers, “I’m sorry.”  
Graham, grateful, sets to work and digs his UV-b lantern from his pack. The moonlight provided plenty of light beneath the luminescent trees, but he felt an actual torch would be helpful. The Doctor was making no movements, so he then cautiously places his hands on her shoulders, indicating to her pack and coat. “I’m going to take this off, yeah?” He awkwardly pretended to ask for permission.   
He himself was never one for touching, so he would admit that as he eased the backpack off and discarded it, even with signs that it provided the Doctor with some sort of relief, he felt tense. And removing her coat felt downright inappropriate. He gathered the lapels in his hands and carefully started to peel it away. The Doctor suppressed a groan, unconsciously turning away, shutting her eyes tight. Graham continued without pause, but rather added a number of hushed reassurances, “Alright, nearly there, deep breaths, that’s it.”

Graham even maintained his calm demeanor as he realized the inside of the coat was caked in a day’s worth of blood. He nonchalantly folded the coat into a neat rectangle. Looking in the light of the lantern, ribbons are all that remain of the back of the Doctor’s blue shirt, the collar of the shirt the only thing still holding in place, the rest is shredded into irregular strips of fabric, now stiff and adhered to the woman’s back. His mouth hangs open in disbelief, suddenly clearly picturing the Sapilin form in his mind, contorted and coiled, two meters tall, with limbs aggregated from ropey vines. In his mind, he can see it happening, a Sapalin savagely whipping the Doctor with one or two strokes as she led the creatures away from Graham, Ryan and Yaz. The Doctor had screamed once during the fight, and then donned her coat and her pack as if nothing had happened and they escaped, that had been that.

My god, he thought to himself in revelation. 

He swallowed against a dry mouth and leaning in close to the Doctor, saying softly, “Doc, I think you need to lie down, okay? Can you do that? If I helped you?” 

“It’s not that bad, really.” she replies, “Just a moment, I’ll be fine.” 

Graham solemnly ignores her and cautiously, but firmly, places his hands on her upper arms. The Doctor noticeably stiffens, but lets him continue without protest. He simultaneously rolls her to one side while lying her flat, so that she’s facedown on the forest floor. Graham wedges her folded coat beneath her head. She’s breathing hard and fast by the time they’re through, and they both sit quietly for nearly a minute. 

Graham had let his hands linger on the Doctor’s head from lifting it to place her rolled coat as a cushion, and he eventually breaks the silence, “You’re awfully warm.”

The Doctor mutters, “Just from the running.”

He does not argue, even though he does not agree. They had stopped running nearly thirty minutes ago, and aside from that the night erred on the side of chilly. Graham finally says, “Doc, I’m sorry, but I have to take a look.” 

There is a solid ten seconds of silence before she answers, “Alright.” Her voice is quiet, and though her eyes are open she is looking sideways, distantly at the trees, her face partially obscured by a curtain of blonde hair. Beyond being in pain, she seems...defeated. 

“I,” Graham leans forward on his knees and admits, “I think your shirt is ruined.”

The Doctor smiles at his macabre joke, “Shame.”

He argues silently with himself for several seconds about how he was going to move the material out of the way; it was without a doubt adhered to the wounds, pulling her shirt away strip by strip would be cautious, but painstaking; pulling the lot up all at once would be quicker, but agonizing. 

“It’s okay,” the Doctor says suddenly, as if able to read his mind, “I’m fine. Use a bit of the water to make the material damp, then peel it all away. One motion. You’re not gonna cause any more damage.”

“Right,” he answers quickly, grateful for the guidance, and produces his canteen of water, about half full. He uncaps it and lets it hover above her back, “Uh, I imagine this may sting. On three. One, two,” the Doctor nods minutely in understanding, “Three.” Graham splashes a moderate amount of water across her back, trying as efficiently as possible to get almost all of the material. 

The Doctor presses her head into her coat/pillow, making a small noise of surprise, but she doesn’t scream. Graham does not let her relax, taking as much of what used to be the hem of the shirt between his fingers and gives it a swift tug. The motion is met with some resistance, but it doesn’t last as he scrunches the destroyed fabric up to her neck.

“I’m so sorry, cockle, all done now.” He breathlessly reassures, placing a hand on top of her head. 

She does not answer, breathing audibly into the fabric of the coat, letting her hands ball into fists. 

He leaves his hand on her head, hoping to convey some sort of comfort, while his other hand tentatively picks up his battery-operated lantern and brings it closer to his friend. Graham holds his breath.   
There are nearly a dozen marks. Three or four are raised welts, with varying lengths of skin that have been broken open and were now scabbed over; bright red and weeping small amounts of blood, a result friction from her backpack while running no doubt. Another four are worse than that, open canals in the skin traversing from shoulder to hip, which are steadily oozing. However traumatizing those wounds were, they paled in comparison to three blatantly open rents which ran parallel to each other, from left shoulder diagonally to her right waistband, deep, revealing layers of skin and muscle, like a razor through shaving cream. The culmination of wounds are so swollen and inflamed that it creates a landscape on her skin, peaks and valleys and rivers, between each gouge where there should be recognizable skin is dried, flaking blood. 

Graham is uncharacteristically speechless. How was she possibly functioning? How had she not said anything? What he managed to say was, “Are you out of your bloody nut?”

The Doctor tries to lift her head, “I’m sure it looks worse than it is. No need to--” 

As mad as he his, he’s gentle in pressing her head back down. Despite the careful action, his tone is furious, “You stay the hell down. I can not actually believe you.” His words are spaced out as he is angrily taking in a breath between each one, “This is serious, Doc. I don’t even know what to say.” 

The Doctor’s voice was stronger now, ready to argue, as she attempts to make eye contact through the corner of her eye up at him, “Makin’ a fuss would have just created undue worry--”

Graham interrupted her again, “Undue worry? You’re torn to bleedin’ shreds. How were you even walking? Do you realize how irresponsible this is? You--you could’ve bled t’ death, could’ve passed out, could’ve went over that ledge thing by the river! You thought you were gonna climb down the cliff to the TARDIS?” He pauses to take a calming breath, and manages to see what can only be shame on the Doctor’s face. He lowers his volume, “This was too reckless, when you are so important, to too many people. Do you understand?”

She was well over thirty times his age, but she felt like a scolded child as she dropped her gaze and whispered, “Yeah.”

Graham stands up and paces back and forth a little, scrubbing his face with his hand, muttering to himself more than to her, “I--I am getting too old for this. What am I supposed to do?”

“I can still walk,” the Doctor tries to defend herself.

“The hell you can.” Graham interrupted.

The Doctor continues, undeterred, “Graham, listen. Just have to make it to the TARDIS. Listen...listen, there’s a yellow dial on the console, the size of a cellphone. Turn that three full rotations to the right, then push the two pink buttons beside it until it clicks.”

“Why are you telling me that? What are you doing?” he asks, somewhat panicked at the Doctor manages to shuffle her coat from beneath her head and awkwardly turn the pockets inside out without moving her arm too much.

“Just in case. Just in case I can’t. Here’s the key to the TARDIS door,” she lays it in the dirt beside her, as if suddenly unable to lift her hand, “Once you’ve finished, there’s a grey foot pedal beside the custard cream dispenser, step down on it two and a half times. It’ll hone in on the sonic, and come pick me up. Once the magnetic field is restored, the TARDIS should be willing to move.”  
“You want me to wait until you get worse, leave you amongst the homicidal weeds and go press all sorts of buttons on a ship that continuously hides the loo from me? Have you actually lost it?” He groans in frustration and kneels back down beside her, “Doc, I can’t do this.”

She manages to reach forward and pat his knee, “Have a little faith, eh.” She shuts her eyes and visibly relaxes. 

Graham lets out an annoyed exhale, swipes the key from the dirt and pockets it. While she’s unconscious he decides to try to cover her back. The only thing usable he has is his sleeping bag and the canvas he was meant to hang as a tent. He ashamedly decides to go through the Doctor’s pack to see if there’s anything in it he can use as first aid. It felt awkward and invasive, but a necessary evil.   
He talks aloud to warn her what he’s doing, but she doesn’t stir. 

The Doctor’s pack is...perplexing. She has a pair of rolled-up socks, a deflated inner tube from a bicycle, a box of open chalk, her uncharged, dead cell phone, about a hundred loose, blank 3x5 index cards, a canteen filled with what Graham could only decern was not water, a dozen bendy straws rubber-banded together. He stopped digging after he found a misprinted copy of Murder on the Orient Express but the pages were printed backwards so that the first chapter was last, the last chapter missing entirely. Graham closed the bag and set it aside, mumbling, “You know, even for an alien you’re a strange bird.”

He opted to cut a square out of the canvas he had, and tenderly laid it over her back, timidly tucking it around her a little. It wasn’t absorbent, but he felt it would stick less to the open wounds than his sleeping bag. 

And then he sat and waited, alone with his thoughts. 

\--- --- --- --- ---

She stirs at the sound of Graham knocking boughs together. He’s seated beside her prone form, working quietly. She opens her eyes and watches him for a moment before scratchily whispering, “We building a fort?”

He pauses to show a sad, what was supposed to be reassuring smile, “A litter.”

“Shame, I love a fort,” she was obviously fighting to keep her eyes open, “A litter for what?”

He resumes lashing two branches together with the length of cord he had divided with his small travel shears, “You. You’re going back to the treehouse.”

She makes a feeble, halfhearted attempt to rebuke, but he shakes his head, “I’ll have none of that. The TARDIS is another four hour walk, on working legs.   
“I can’t up and leave you alone here, for god-knows-what to find you. I can still hear the Creeper People, moving around, and you’re getting worse. Either way, the treehouse is only a couple of kilometers. I’ll take you back there, me and Yaz will go to the TARDIS and turn on the radiation thingy, Ryan will do the generator. Bing, bang, boom, day saved and all that. Yaz and I will come pick you two up in the ship, using the foot-gear thing like you said.” 

He is worried when she doesn’t try to argue. She had been worsening over the last half hour, shivering and muttering nonsensical sounds, and now, even though her eyes were open, she looks even more far away than when they were closed.

It takes Graham nearly half an hour to tie together enough branches to create a plank a little wider than the Doctor’s body. He pads it with the remaining canvas he hadn’t used to cover the Doctor’s wounds, uses a braid of vines to create a rein of sorts, and ta-dah he had a very crude looking sleigh. He knows it must be torture, but eventually he helps her shimmy onto the litter. She bites her tongue and feebly lifts herself enough for Graham to slide the contraption beneath her. “There we go,” he encourages, “Riding in style, now.” He offers her a forced, cheesy grin, sweeps a lock of her hair off her face.

She says once she’s eventually caught her breath, “I didn’t know Grace,” Graham freezes when the Doctor says it, “But I can’t help but think of how proud she would be of you.”

Graham passes his hand over her hair again, “Yeah? I wish I could thank her, you know. She showed me how important it was to take care of other people. I wish..I wish I’d done it more with her here.” He shakes his head and forces another smile, “Anyway, your chariot awaits.” He dusted off his pants and took the rope in his hands, and then started the longest short journey of his life, dragging the body of the Doctor along the bank of the river.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY 2: MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

“-an!” Ryan heard distantly, slowly waking him from sleep. He lay there a moment, listening to what he could have sworn was the wind calling his name. 

“Ryan! Ryan, Yaz.” 

By then Yaz also stirred. She sleepily asked him, “You hear that?”

“Ryan, Yaz, come on you lot!” 

“Graham!” both of them shot up and scrambled out of their sleeping bags and towards the doorless door frame. 

Beneath where they stood on the wrap-around platform, twenty feet below was Graham. Beside Graham on the ground was the prone form of the Doctor. 

Ryan and Yaz both exclaimed, “Oh my god!” before tripping over themselves to race to the metal ladder. 

Yaz descended first and threw herself beside the makeshift litter, “What happened?” 

Yaz made a move to touch the Doctor’s shoulder, but Graham stopped her, “No, be careful. She’s in a bad way. Turns out she took a whipping at the temple. She tried to hide it, but she went over on our way to the TARDIS. I didn’t have a choice, I had to bring her back.”

The young woman opted for placing a hand on the Doctor’s face as Graham explained, and she recoiled at the Doctor’s temperature, “Jesus, she’s burning up.” Yaz looks up somewhat incredulously at the older man, who is drenched in sweat, carrying two backpacks and nursing a monsterous blister on his right hand from the reins, “You carried her all the way here?” 

Graham nods at the litter, “Dragged, more or less. Not bad for an old bus driver, eh?”

By then Ryan had made it down the ladder, “Man,” he surveyed the Doctor, “How are we meant to get her up there?” 

Both Yaz and Graham looked suspiciously at him. Ryan vehemently shook his head. “No way. I’ll drop her!”

“Listen, son,” Graham claps a hand on his shoulder, “You’re the strongest one here. It’s no different than at the warehouse, moving stuff from point A to point B.” 

“Stuff? That’s the Doctor’s life, and that’s a huge tree.”

Yaz intervenes, still with one hand on the Doctor’s cheek, “He’s right, Ryan. You haven’t had any trouble with the ladder yet, and the Doctor needs you to do this. You can do it.” 

Ryan begrudgingly agrees, and with the help of Yaz and Graham, they meticulously hoist the Doctor over his shoulder. The Doctor stirs minimally, letting out a low groan. 

Yaz goes up first, Ryan behind her. As Ryan ascends, he whispers to his precious cargo, “All gonna be fine, Doctor. You’ve got a crack team, we’re gonna help you, just hang in there.” 

To his own amazement, he reaches the steel platform without a hitch. Yaz beckons as he stands up straight, “Alright? Bring her through. Brilliant job, Ryan.” he follows her into the circular hut and she gestures to the steel desk, “Let her down here.” 

Graham now enters the hut, dropping both his and the Doctor’s bags by the entrance with much relief. He has the Doctor’s rolled up coat in his hands and sets it on the end of the desk as he joins the others in maneuvering the Doctor’s body onto the flat surface, so she was facedown, her arms beside her, head turned to one side. Yaz turns on her own battery-powered lantern, its sharp, artificial light illuminating off the metal walls. 

“Easy, easy, that’s it,” Graham encourages as the finally get the Doctor rearranged. 

Yaz feels the blood drain from her face as she takes in the actual state the Doctor is in. “She’s been hurt since yesterday? Why didn’t she say anything?”

“Wish I knew, love. I think she thought she was protecting us from being worried. Plus, you know the Doc, not really into fussing with the personal details.”

Yaz swallowed an imaginary stone, and reached for the scrap of canvas covering the Doctor. Very, very carefully she peeled it away. In her sleep, the Doctor grimaced and moaned in pain. Ryan took a literal step back, and tears immediately came to Yaz’s eyes. 

“No.” Ryan said under his breath, as her wounds were uncloaked. 

Graham had to admit, it looked worse than it did two hours previously, or maybe in the dark of the forest he failed to notice the thick yellow pus that was being secreted from the edges of the deepest scores. There were some random blue fibers, still adhered to some of the wounds from her jumper.

“We, um,” Yaz is trying to compose herself, fighting back tears and saying firmly, “We have to clean this up.”

They all slowly start to take undirected initiative. Ryan moves to her feet and makes to remove her boots; Yaz fetches her canteen of water; Graham collects one of the blankets and starts cutting it into usable pieces. 

As Yaz cuts the collar of her shirt, the last straggling peice keeping her top functionally a top, and prepares to unhook her bra, the Doctor stirs, “Nngghh.” 

Her breathing increases and she starts to twist her head from side to side. Yaz kneels beside her and places a hand on her cheek, “Hey, hey, hey, easy, Doctor. It’s alright, you’re okay. Lie still.”

“Yaz?” she questions as she blinks, disoriented, “Ah!”

“Be still, be still,” Yaz reassures, trying to stop her writhing.

“Happened?”

“Well, apparently you took a hell of a whipping at the temple, kept it a secret, then passed out on your way to the TARDIS. Graham brought you back to the treehouse.” 

“Is he okay?” 

“Sure am, Doc,” Graham said from behind her, “I’m right here. Needless to say, you will be getting the bill for my physical therapy.”

“And Ryan?”

Ryan’s face floated in the background, “Right here, of course.”

“Safe?”

“Everyone is okay, apart from you. Now Doctor, listen to me,” Yaz says seriously, “I know you’re in a lot of pain, but your wounds need to be cleaned. It can’t wait. Do you understand?”

The Doctor searches Yaz’s pleading eyes for a moment before she answers softly, “Hold me down.”

Ryan reappears and takes each of her wrists, lowering her arms so that she was forced to give the desk a hug. He leans so that he is in her line of sight. He whispered into her ear, half-joking, to think of facts about acetylene. 

Graham leaned over the backs of her knees, potentially leaving one hand free if he needed it. 

Yaz unhooks her bra unnecessarily, as it is torn through, so that the deepest of the lashes is continuous from shoulder to hip, the dried blood is what’s keeping the garment in place. Yaz peels it away, then having to cut one of the straps; the whip had apparently cut through the other one. Aside from laying on her front, the Doctor’s shirt sleeves are still intact, holding her shirt loosely to the front of her body, preserving some form of modesty. 

“Okay,” Yaz says with a grim expression, wetting the flannel with water, “Here we go.” 

She starts with a timid, almost too-gentle swipe of the welt at the top of the Doctor’s neck, and starts to work downward. The Doctor involuntarily jumps, forcing Ryan and Graham to secure her into place. At first, she is silent, but at Yaz’s ministrations move to the deeper lacerations, she accidentally screams. Yaz starts stammering apologies, rinsing the cloth and continuing. The Doctor, between yelps and gritted teeth, forces a couple of harsh sentences, “You’re doing brilliantly, everyone. Ah! Keep at it.”

Yaz’s face is now streaming with tears as she works, so much so that after a couple of minutes, Graham places a gentle hand over hers, silently willing her to switch places. Yaz concedes, forfeiting the cloth and taking up his position keeping the Doctor’s legs still. Graham scoots up to her torso, and wordlessly resumes the necessary torture. He swipes away the pus and the blood, scrubbing to loosen the stuck fibers from her shirt, needing to become more and more firm. The Doctor’s whole body trembles as she emits a low, continuous whine of agony.

Ryan has her hands locked in his, joined together under the table; his face is resting beside hers on the steel desktop, and he’s whispering in her ear, “We’re almost done now, just a bit more.”

Near the end of the endeavor, she passes out. Yaz and Ryan let up on restraining her now-still body, and Graham continues until the crisscrossed pulp of flesh making up her back is relatively clean. Yaz soaks strips of cloth, then wraps them around her friend. They would undoubtedly dry and stick to the wounds, but the wounds could not simply be left open while the Doctor was in this state. Ryan unzips his sleeping bag so that it opens into a large rectangle, and drapes it over his unconscious friend, up to her waist so as not to irritate her injuries. The Doctor is still trembling, and occasionally she groans. 

Yaz finds herself holding one of the Doctor’s limp hands, staring at her as she twitches and whines. She looks to Ryan and Graham, “Now what?”

\--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Someone is humming. The steady thrum eases her back to consciousness, coming down in her mind like waves. She realizes her head is pounding, the humming pulses softly inside her skull. Before she can open her eyes she tries to will the headache away, with little success. Slowly she becomes more and more aware of herself, her neck aches and the front of her body tingles with the weight of lying still too long, and her limbs are leaden and immobile with a bone-deep exhaustion she cannot explain. It’s hard to breathe, aside from lying on her chest for who knows how long, there is a burning, tearing pain that worsens and lessens with each intake and exhale, but never fully abates. She is nauseous, but empty. Her mouth is dry, with a sour taste, and she makes a mammoth effort to swallow, to encourage the movement of saliva. 

The humming stops. A sensation of warmth envelops her right hand, which is strange, because she cannot orient exactly where her hand was in relationship to the rest of her. Now the humming is gone and she can hear the rustle of tree branches against a metal roof, dancing slowly on the wind. A voice both much too loud and much too quiet starts dragging her even closer to the surface, “Doctor?”

Yasmin Khan had been holding vigil over the wounded Doctor, who had been out for a couple of hours. It was quiet, save for the scraping of the hateful trees against the treehouse, and the sad howl of the wind. She had began to hum, a nonsense tune she couldn’t remember where she’d heard before, to try and comfort herself in the eery, natural quiet.   
It was also fairly dark, she decided to save the battery of her torch, so the only light in the space was the grey moon bouncing off the shiny walls, welcomed in from the open, glassless windows and door frame. There was enough light for her to make out the new motions starting to take over the Doctor’s unconscious features. The Doctor had maintained a tense ere, providing that even in the land of nod she was in agony, but now there is a change in her breathing, and her nose wrinkles as if she had tasted something foul. Yaz recognizes that she is about to wake, leans forward on her knees and takes the Doctor’s hand in both of hers, “Doctor?”

The Doctor’s face contorts and she mewls in obvious discomfort, her eyes open, and suddenly she tries to rise.

“No, no, no,” Yas protests, standing up and holding out her hands as if in a sign of peace. 

The Doctor sobs and collapses back on the metal table, panting and gasping for air.

“Hey, now, it’s alright. Doctor, look at me, come on now,” Yaz frantically pet her hair trying to calm her, “That’s it, just try and breathe.” 

The Doctor blinks, trying to orient herself in the dim, making random noises of distress, “What--what happened?” 

“You don’t remember?”

She dazedly looks from Yaz to the rest of the room, “I...I feel awful.”

“Yeah, you will do,” Yaz kneels as close to the table as possible, again holding the Doctor’s hand, “Graham and Ryan went to flip the radiation switch. I’ll turn on the generator as soon as I get the signal. We were going to wait, you know. But Ryan said you’d go mental if you woke up and we hadn’t stopped the broadcast. 

“Anyway, we cleaned you up as best we could, but you need some actual attention. You’re not bleeding still, but your back is a disaster. That and you’re running a fever.” 

The Doctor makes another attempt at raising her head, “Can...can you help me sit up, please?”

Yaz purses her lips, “I think you really ought to just lie still.”

The Doctor offers a morose smile, “I promise not to do a runner… Just really sore from lying like this.”

Yaz sighs, but starts to help her friend into a sitting position. The venture is slow, filled with pauses and noises, and from Yaz there’s some escaped tears. Eventually, the Doctor is upright, white-knuckled fists gripping the edge of the desktop, trying to stop the room spinning. She mutters, “Ooh, head wonk,”

The police officer has her hands at the ready to catch the Doctor, should she keel over. She stays, allowing for a pause before asking, “Doctor, why didn’t you tell us?”

The Doctor has her eyes squeezed shut, “I, ah, it wasn’t that bad, really… Had worse… You know, I really thought I could get away, but...this body...isn’t as fast. And if you knew the set of knees I had before, phew, that’s saying something.” As she pieces sentences together, grinning unconvincingly at her own joke, Yaz looks at the positioning of the Doctor’s hands on the table, and she notices in the dark a matching set deep red welts circumventing both of her wrists. The younger woman nearly reaches out to touch the scratches, instead bringing her fingers to her lips as it occurred to her that the Doctor wasn’t merely swiped by a stray Sapilin limb, but rather she had been caught by the creatures...she had been held in place… The mental picture and its connotations made Yaz feel ill.

The blonde blinks and looks up to Yaz, noticing the look of devastation on her face, “Are you alright?”

Yaz has no words at first, she is feeling too many things; she is sad and astounded, and wants nothing more than to hug the Doctor. She is also very, very angry. She scoffs, “Me? Me? Of course I’m not alright, look at you!” She doesn’t mean it, but her voice gets louder and louder until she’s actually yelling, “I mean, actually look at the state of you! You think this is alright? To be tortured on our behalf? To keep it a secret? Why?” She was coming to the realization that, while she was well aware that the Doctor was not always truthful, she actually had no idea how often and to what degree she was not always truthful. How could she try and hide this? How many other times had she been hurt and said nothing? She could hide being ripped to literal shreds, what else? Yaz whispers, “This is your life...Don’t you trust us?”

In the dark, the Doctor’s features slowly relax, and transform into a strange form of...sadness...Yaz wasn’t sure she’d seen before. The Doctor runs her tongue over her dry lips, thoughtfully, and answers very softly, “It’s not a matter of trust, Yasmin Khan. You’re right, it was irresponsible, and I’m sorry. I thought I had it under control. You have to understand...I don’t always have others around me. I’ve been around a long time, Yaz, and in a life like this, one learns that sometimes a solitary scope requires...a caliber of resistance.”

Yaz sits quietly for a moment or so, letting herself calm down. “Doctor, I can’t pretend to know why you are the way you are. And…” she pauses thoughtfully, “I don’t think it’s my place to try and understand what made you so resilient. I don’t expect you to change, that’s not fair. But...If it needs saying, you’re not alone now. I hope you recognize that. That word you use, family? It’s not a funny name to us. That word means something, and it demands a little respect.”

The Doctor has a strange look on her face. She’s not used to being yelled at, and more so she’s not used to being wrong. She studies Yaz’s face for a few more seconds before conceding, “I’m sorry. You’re right, and I’m sorry.” 

It is quiet and somewhat awkward until Yaz tries to diffuse some of the muted tension by forcing the Doctor to drink some water.

Afterward, the Doctor swears up and down that she was fine, but Yaz could see after a while she was too exhausted to keep herself upright, and the desk was too uncomfortable to resume a prone position, so with some convincing she had agreed to lay down. Together they shuffled to the other side of the hut, to Yaz’s sleeping bag, and after a number of minutes had the Doctor laid down somewhat on her side, propped up with the Doctor’s sleeping bag rolled up lengthwise, and covered again with Ryan’s. 

“You should...rest, too,” the Doctor says tiredly, leaving long pauses between words, as Yaz draped the sleeping bag over her.

Yaz nods, “I will do. The sun should be up soon, though. The generator’s ready, I’m going to wait for the signal from Graham and Ryan.”

“Why did Ryan go?”

“S-sorry?” Yaz kneels beside her.

“I mean, he was...reluctant about descending the cliff. I’m very proud of him...changing his mind, but why...did he do it?”

“We couldn’t let Graham go alone, and honestly Ryan was pretty freaked at the state of you.”

The Doctor raised her head, “He shouldn’t--”

“Ah-ah,” Yaz scolds, “You stay put. Look, Ryan, wanted to stay with you too, but his lack of coping skills are second only to yours, so he figured he’d be able to handle the dyspraxia better than he’d handle looking after you.” 

“Oh,” is all she responds. If Yaz didn’t know better, she’d say the Doctor’s feelings were hurt. 

Yaz puts on a smile, “Anyway, so you’re stuck with me as a carer.”

The Doctor smiles back, “You’re doing a...brilliant job… Couldn’t ask for anyone better.”

Yaz tucks a bit of hair behind her ear, “Er, could I ask you something?”

“‘Course.”

“Why’d you take Graham earlier? I mean,” she felt terribly guilty in saying that Graham was typically the slowest. It didn’t make sense to pick him to take on a time sensitive mission. 

“I knew I was...slowing down a bit, I figured he’d get...less ahead of me than you would. If given the choice I would’ve taken you… He complained the entire time, anyway,” she grinned at her jest, before continuing on with seriousness, “That, and he’d already suspected...something was wrong. He’d asked me a couple of times.”  
Yaz makes a face of surprise.

The Doctor looks guilty once again, “I...asked him not to say anything.” 

The younger woman rubs her forehead and eventually says, “Well, once all is said and done, and you’re in a better state, I think we might have to have a family meeting.” 

The Doctor makes a small nod, and says with what Yaz can only call sarcasm, “Fun.” 

Yaz reaches over and gave her hand a squeeze, “Anyway, for now you just rest. Home soon.”

“Can do.” the Doctor mutters, and shuts her eyes.

Yaz sits beside her for several minutes, watching as the transformation of sleep overcomes her features; her muscles relax, her breaths deepen, and she looks...heavier in the way that one does in sleep. 

The younger woman goes to watch the treeline from the platform, waiting for the signal. 

\--- --- --- -- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

She began feeling a little anxious as the first sun peaked across the treeline, and the blue signal from Ryan and Graham had still not come. She glances back into the shelter, studying the unconscious form of the Doctor as she jerks and shudders in a restless, fevered sleep, face contorted in anguish. 

A few more minutes pass. She taps her fingers impatiently on the makeshift safety railing of the platform, the second sun starting to cast its light across the forest. She becomes aware of a new scraping, cracking sound, which slowly gets louder and louder. At first confused, Yaz leans over the railing to investigate its source. 

Her mouth drops open and she feels her heart sink.

The tide of the river had withdrawn, the phenomenal moving body leaves had shriveled and disappeared, and where its banks had been carving its path, now stood several Sapilin creatures, carefully maneuvering their way closer and closer to the base of the treehouse. 

Yaz gripped the railing, paralyzed with the uncertainty of what to do. “Uhh...Doctor, can you hear me?” she called, eyes skating from the approaching monsters to the skyline where the signal could be any second. “Come on, guys, come on.” 

The second sun was in full view now, “Doctor, wake up!” she hollered over her shoulder, still willing the blue light to appear. 

The arch of the third sun starts to stretch across the horizon. The gathering of Sapilin seem to double in number, as vines coil from the earth below and start to form more and more. Yaz thinks her heart leaps from her stomach to her mouth.

“Get in!” she whoops, as a streak of lustrous blue light jettisons from the faraway tree line up to the pale pink sky, and the third sun reaches its peak across the horizon. Yaz turns and sprints to the panel, and triumphantly flips the green switch. 

Nothing happens.

Yaz feels like her legs go numb. She frantically flips the switch several times, imploring the generator to power up. The sound of the Sapilin still crescendoing outside. She glances at the still-incapacitated Doctor, and darts to the Doctor’s discarded coat. Yaz orders as she ransacks the pockets, “Doctor, please, please wake up!”

Yaz finds the sonic screwdriver and flies back to the panel. She then, admittedly very stupidly, points it at the generator and prays.

Still nothing.

She shakes the tool angrily and bolts to the platform. The creatures are mere meters away now. 

Yaz throws one more glance at the Doctor, and then makes for the ladder. Once on the ground, she waves her arms and starts to back away from the approaching horde of eyeless, arboreal monsters, “Oi, you lot! This way!!”

The strategy works, for a moment. The Sapilins start slinking towards her. That is until a familiar voice calls to her, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Yaz is laden with another bout of dread as she looks up and sees the Doctor, raggedly holding herself half-up on the railing of the platform. Several Sapilins break off from the group and start back toward the treehouse. 

The police officer does not have time to respond or react, because then she feels a strange, warm sensation in her hand. She glances down to see the sonic screwdriver she was too frazzled to discard, pulsing and glowing. The pulsing suddenly synching with a familiar wheezing sound. “No.” Yaz says, looking back up at the Doctor on the platform above, barely upright, a Sapilin creature starting to ascend the ladder; all of that fading away as the walls of the TARDIS materialized around her. 

\--- --- --- -- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

Yaz finds herself stood beside the familiar console of the TARDIS, Graham and Ryan standing before her with puzzled looks on their faces. 

Ryan immediately nods to the screwdriver in her hand, “Why you have that?”

“Oh my god,” she exhales, feeling sick. She takes of running towards the doors, screaming, “Doctor!”

The boys follow immediately. 

“Doctor! Doct--” Yaz stops in her tracks. The Sapilin quietly surround the TARDIS where it had materialized around where she had stood. They all turn their gnarled faces in her direction as she exits the ship. No one moves. The guys bump into her back as she halts. 

A single creature, the one closest to Yaz, only a foot away, kneels in front of her. She stares at it in shock. The creature slowly raises an arduous limb and presents it to her. As she looks at what must be an arm, a single silver flower morphs and blooms. Yaz only stares.

“You’re meant to take it,” a voice calls. Yaz is broken from her trance to once again look up to the treehouse platform, to the Doctor standing awkwardly, being gently held up by a pair of creatures. Yaz, still ill at ease, plucks the flower from the creature and nods a timid thank you. She then starts for the treehouse. Ryan and Graham are not far behind. Once they make it up the ladder, they find the Doctor, still supported by the pair of Sapilin, one on either side, thanking the creatures for their help.

“You were all so, so brilliant.” the Doctor beams, though she still looks terrible. She miraculously holds Ravanac's foil notebook in one hand. 

Yaz, bewildered, glances into the treehouse and sees the panel of the generator, lit up in an array of colors and humming softly. “Um, what the hell just happened?” She unconsciously hands the sonic to the Doctor, who takes it with small, purposeful movements. 

The Doctor bobs her head, “Did I fail to mention there might be a small delay in transmission?” She smiles.

\--- --- --- -- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---

The Doctor slowly opens her eyes. The room is dimly lit, but recognizable. 

Beside her, sitting on the floor with his back resting against the sofa she was laid across, was Ryan. His knees were drawn up, so that he was resting his phone only inches from his face, engrossed in the game he was playing on it.

She moves her head just enough that the icepack placed on the back of her neck slips off and bounces softly to the floor.

“Hey,” he says surprised, but gentle. He rotates his body to face her, picking up the icepack and returning it to the back of her neck. 

She looks around a little dazedly, before asking in a dehydrated voice, “Why are we in the library?”

“You don’t remember pitching a fit about medbay?” he asks lightly. 

She had fevered flashes of him carrying her onto the TARDIS; of Graham forcing her to drink a medicinal concoction the TARDIS had provided; of Yaz helping her change her clothes; of lapses of cognizance as they kept her anesthetized to properly clean her wounds; of Ryan physically restraining her as she attempted to go to the console, or the kitchen, or the ballroom, anywhere but the medbay. 

“Oh, right.” she said under her breath. 

“Yeah, we tried your bedroom, but you ain’t got no bed in there, did you know that?” he smiled, “It was either here or the kitchen table.”

She couldn’t help but smile back. After a minute or so she looked him up and down, “You’re not here to yell at me, too, are you?”

“Want me to?” he inclines his head. 

“Not particularly,” she sinks her face a little further into the cushion.

“Eh, Yaz and Graham told me they already...expressed their concerns. I think for now you should just relax. I’m just here to babysit.”

“Where are the others?” 

“Sleeping. You need anything?” 

She shook her head a little. He picked up his phone to resume his game. 

“Ryan?” she says. 

“Hm?” he doesn’t look up.

The Doctor swallows, “I’m sorry."

He sighs, pauses the screen and faces her again, “I know.” He scoots a little closer, “And just so we’re clear, I don’t think any less of you for hurtin’. You can pack things in all you like. Only so much stuff fits in a certain space,” he gestures to the library of their police box, “And not like this, you know what I mean!” 

She laughs a little as he smiles, proud of his own joke. 

With that, the Doctor closes her eyes and rests.


	3. Coefficient of Friction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revist of the end of 12x07 ("Can You Hear Me?"), when Graham is trying to tell the Doctor about his fears. This is more of a look into what went through the characters minds during this scene, with a tiny tweak at the end.

It was this body, this incarnation, different from its predecessors. Its mouth spoke fast and pressured, its hands fidgeted, it shifted weight from one foot to the other incessantly. The fizzing, nagging urge to move, to run. To dive and leap and bound and go. Constant forward motion, immortal. There was no reasoning with it, no tamping it down, no running it off. 

And she. Was. Tired. But that did not matter, the cramps in her muscles and the curl in her gut still begged her to advance. Stopping was akin to trying to drown one’s self; no matter how deep one sinks, no matter how many stones are lashed to one’s feet, one will still inevitably inhale. 

And if she did stop...then what? The other side of that terrible coin was the fear that she would never get going again. Even a perpetual motion machine has to overcome the coefficient of friction when it starts. If she stopped, if she breathed, would she be able to kick off again? Heroism, if that’s what one could call it, did not come without its fuel. If she paused and considered what was making her travel, turn the gears of the in her ship, leap from one disaster to another without a considerable end in sight...would she still want to? If she was the only thing weaving between the tines of history, ensuring that it played out as only she knew it should...why bother? 

She was prancing beside the custard cream dispenser, trying to convince it to yield two biscuits instead of one, when Graham pulls her aside with a soft, serious voice, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

His tone was...different. It isn’t her forte, cues and tones and body language, such things that were subjective between worlds, species and individuals alike, but she recognizes his tone is unalike the one he usually uses, and it makes her pause. Unconsciously, she squares her stance and crosses her arms, hoping to still restless hands. His tone is different, and today against Zellin was trifling, so she knew he needed her attention. 

“The thing is, Doc, I worry about getting sick again.” He says.

Oh. Her subconscious fear that he was about to ask to not travel anymore somewhat dissipates. 

Graham continues, “You know, about the...about the cancer coming back. And I didn’t know who to say it to, so I thought I’d say it to you. You know, seeing as you’re a doctor.” It was a poorly masked lie. He couldn’t bring himself to say exactly why; in fact, the reason he wanted to talk to her shouldn’t need an explanation. She was his friend, at least he considered her to be. And despite appearances, she was venerable, aged and experienced and she knew loss, she knew pain, she knew fear in a way that Ryan and Yaz simply could not. She might have a hell of a way of expressing it, but Graham knew that she could relate to what he was trying to say. 

She continues to look at him expectantly, arms still crossed, head cocked to the side, the battle to writhe and fiddle being stifled. He searched for more words, “You know, ‘cos once you have it, it’s with you the whole time. Not quite a shadow, but...uh… Hey, don’t get me wrong. I mean, my check-ups, they’re all fine, but it...it made me think, you know, and, um, I thought I should talk about it,”

She leans in a little and he starts to move his hands with nervous energy as she remains stock-still, “‘Cos those nightmares, I mean…” he cleared his throat, “Well, they made me realize that the fear...is--is--is still there, you know.” 

There is a long pause. A pause that should be awkward, but he doesn’t feel that way.

She recognizes an anticipatory look on his face. He’s done talking. He wants reciprocation. “I should say a reassuring thing now, shouldn’t I?”

He had to admit, he didn’t know what he was expecting, “Yeah, probably.”

Reassuring? She could not. Not sincerely. Did he want to hear that the cancer wouldn’t return? That it was silly to be afraid? She couldn’t. Brave, unafraid people died every day. “I’m still quite socially awkward…” she abated. Her limbs loosened and ached with relief as she began to move, “So I’m just going to subtly walk towards the console and look at something.” She bent over the machinery, comforted by the distance between Graham and her it provided, “And then, in a minute, I’ll think of something that I should’ve said...that might’ve been helpful.”

He laughed a little, “Okay.” He leaned his backside against the console, “Well, I’m glad we had this chat, eh?” She’s rubbish at deciphering sarcasm from genuineness, as much as he’s rubbish at speaking only one or the other. 

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.” As much as his fears are not dispelled, he can’t help but smile. He did not know what he was expecting from the conversation, but for some reason felt soothed. 

She glanced up at the back of his head as he stared off into the distance, facing away from her. Some fears were meant to be experienced, as cruel as it seemed. No speech, no commiserating touch, no encouraging words. Sometimes, there was no magic fix. Sometimes, one just needs to be heard. She had no compassionate words, and she would not exchange her own miseries in hopes of kindling empathy. 

She mutters, “‘Learn from my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own’.” The gears turned in her head as she straightened up and stepped around the console. Graham is still facing half-way away, and didn’t have time to react when she brushes her fingers along his temple. 

It was a gentle intrusion, a docile, telepathic push. She did not take anything, did not sequester anything, only left him with quiet words, ‘I cannot offer you security, but what I can provide you is opportunity.’ and a soft, musical ere in his ears. 

He sank a little harder against the console and shook his head. He turned to her, with a dazed look on his face, “You just hear that music?” He lightly scratched his temple where she had touched. 

She raised her eyebrows and feigned concern, “Alright there, Graham?”

“Thought something touched me. I--” he glanced at her and then around the TARDIS, then shook his head and smiled, “Uh, actually, yeah. Right as rain.” He could swear something brushed past his head as he dazed off into the distance, accompanied with several cords of beautiful, enigmatic music. It lasted only a second or so, but he felt an inexplicable rush of...enthusiasm? Energy? 

“Good,” she nods and smiles brightly, “Because I have an incredible idea.” The verve and fizzing becoming overwhelming once more. 

The Doctor turns and leaps off the platform of the console, landing gracelessly beside the pillar where Ryan and Yaz were sat, lost in their own discussion. Graham hears her exclaim loudly, “Frankenstein!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘Learn from my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own’ -Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 
> 
> Comments and constructive criticism always welcome, and I hope you enjoyed!


	4. Entre Eux

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4: The Doctor and her Fam are enjoying a day exploring an abandoned moon, when they come across a scorned native species who has a vendetta against humans, and begins hunting them. T for blood and violence. Hurt/comfort, Angst and some fluff.   
> There's a reason the Doctor always stands between her companions and the dangers they face...
> 
> Inspired by a gif-set I saw on Tumblr where Thirteen always makes a point to stand in front of her friends because of how Bill died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Entre Eux = between them (or at least that's what google translate says; I do not speak french, but I hope google came through for me)
> 
> I hope everyone enjoys! Comments and constructive criticisms always welcome.

“No-no-no! Don’t close--!” the door swings soundly shut, Graham’s voice drops from excited to defeated as they all stare at the smooth, handle-less surface, “...the door.”

“Ah.” The Doctor states, and throws an apologetic glance to her companions for letting it shut behind her.

“It’s metal,” Ryan suggests, “Can you sonic it open?”

She nods affirmingly, “Absolutely.”

They all wait in silence for a second or so before Ryan suspiciously asks, “You don’t have your sonic, do you?”

She grimaces apologetically again, “No.” 

The men groan and roll their eyes. “Oi,” the Doctor says indignantly, “Assistive devices don’t upload here. How long have you been stuck in here, then?” She asks Graham, who had been missing since almost the beginning of their adventure. 

“This is the only room I’ve been in.”

Ryan criticizes, “You only made it one room?” 

Graham nearly stamps his foot, “I told you when we landed I’m rubbish at these games. Unlike you, I spent my young adult life learning useful, real-world applications, not playing silly games.” 

“Well, that’s me told, innit? Oh, wait, which of us is locked in a cupboard?”

“All of us, now!” Graham raised his voice and pointed his chin to the shut door. 

“Boys!” the Doctor finally intervenes, “Not helping.” She glances the older man up and down, “The door to this room opens and closes every fifteen minutes. What kept you?”

Graham huffs and brandished his right ankle, secured in a thick metal shackle and tethered to the wall, “The door shuts and the rope loosens so I can walk around, but when the door opens the damned rope retracts into the wall so I’m stuck stood here staring into the corridor, but not able to move. What good is being able to reach the door when it’s shut and I’m chained up?”

The Doctor scrunches her eyebrows together and ran her hand across the smooth surface of the door. Her palm immediately catches against a small groove. She wedges her little finger under the groove and works a metal tool from its camouflage amongst the metal door. “Key.” She says simply and tosses it to Graham, nodding to his ankle. 

Graham looks supremely annoyed as he turns the key over in his hand and then bends to unlock his shackle, muttering, “Like it’s obvious.” 

Ryan is holding back tears from laughter, “This is one of the kids’ level rooms.”

A metallic ping interrupts them, and a genderless voice comes across the intercom in a too-cheery lilt, “Attention competitors, your hour of play has come to an end. Please collect your belongings and exit the virtual reality.” 

Ryan and the Doctor’s disappointed grumblings mixed simultaneously with Graham’s sigh of relief as the walls began to dissolve and de-pixelate from around them, the VR game adjourning and revealing the Doctor, Ryan, Graham and Yaz standing on separate pedestals, encased in plexiglass. The casings hissed and squeaked open so that the group could step down. They all removed the simulation helmets they had donned, and were all chatting and abuzz with the aspects of the game each of them got to interact with, apart from Graham. 

==========================

_ The Doctor had brought them to visit Welcenturia, a human-based colony moon that had been abandoned decades prior. The moon had been inhabited for nearly a century before the planet it orbited was fully terraformed. Once the planet was hospitable, the crowded, industrial settlers relocated. They left behind a well-developed moon which Yaz, noticeably unimpressed, compared to a post-zombie-apocalyptic world. There were homes and office buildings and shops and even a playground, all sat abandoned, sagging with rust and decay. It was admittedly haunting, the dark, grimy windows and building overtaken by vines and weeds; rusted vehicles similar to cars lined the cracking, cobbled roads. Everything looked like it was sagging under the weight of itself, sinking into the ground in slow motion, being digested, consumed by time and nature.  _

_ The group of travelers had come specifically for what might have been the most chilling of establishments; the abandoned carnival. The Doctor claimed it had one of the best virtual reality puzzle games ‘this side of the forty-ninth century’. The carnival was industrial, with big, metal facsimiles of things the Fam recognized, like a ferris wheel that spun on a horizontal axis, bumper-cars in the shapes of saucers, booths of long-forgotten games of dried-up pools and broken throwing rings, flat and rotten balls used to knock down now-broken milkbottles, walls of empty shelves littered with aluminum darts. Everything was dim in color, missing pieces and spokes, covered in the same greenish-purple dust everything else was covered in, even hung in the air filtering everything through a thin, muted haze. _

_ The Doctor proudly led them to the virtual reality game booth and enthusiastically powered it on with the wave of her sonic screwdriver. The lights of the massive simulator pedestals power on, and creak and groan in aged protest; eery chords of music stutter and start to crank through a somewhat blown speaker and a small, anthropomorphic robot at the counter of the booth starts to power on. She beams, “The majority of this is just bells and whistles. The real game is in the helmet, but how exciting does this all look?” _

_ Graham unsuredly asks, “Er, Doc, this seems great and all, but why not bring us here at a time when, you know, it was a little less War of the Worlds?” _

_ “What?” she blows dust off one of the simulation helmets as it blinks to life. She shrugs her shoulders and lifts her hands up as if it were obvious, “And wait in a queue?” _

==========================

The rusted, dilapidated biped robot was patiently waiting for them as they exited the game. “Congratulations, competitors!” it voiced with an out-of-tune speaker, “Thank you for playing AutoMechtechnic’s Virtual Escape Rooms. Graham-Slam-fifty-nine,” the robot turned jerkily to Graham, whose face turned a shade of deep red, not realizing the robot would say the username he’d come up with outloud. Ryan and Yaz gave each other cheeky sideways glances as the mouthed ‘Graham Slam’ to each other. The robot continued unhindered, “Personal best, one room complete. Please accept this consolation prize.” 

The robot’s creaky chest opened and revealed a small, plastic, multicolored kazoo. Graham couldn’t help but smile as he took the small toy from the robot’s prize-collection cavity, “Oh, cheers.”

The chest piece closed and the robot addressed Yaz, “Yazmanian-devil, personal best, two rooms and forty percent completion of the torsional puzzle challenge. Please accept this consolation prize.” Yaz clapped a little excitedly as the prize chamber revealed a small, yellow almost-teddy bear. The soft toy was similar to a teddy, with the exception that its limbs came to soft, fabric points instead of paws, and it had three button eyes instead of two. 

The crackling game robot continues, “Ryan-S-two-thousand, personal best, five rooms completed. Please accept this consolation prize.” Ryan grinned happily, waiting for his prize, but scoffed to realize he got the same plush toy as Yaz, only in purple instead of yellow. He waved it carelessly, “What, I did more than twice the rooms she did, why did we got the same prize?” The robot ignores him and moves on to the Doctor as he holds his teddy bear up next to Yaz and mutters, “Could have at least been bigger or something.” Yaz elbows him and tucks her prize under her arm.

“Doctor-comma-The, personal best, one hundred and thirteen rooms completed; dimensional folding challenge completed; pattern evasion challenge completed. Please accept this consolation prize.” Ryan and Yaz are murmuring between themselves in awe about how much the woman had managed in their hour of play as the robot reveals her prize.

The Doctor pumps a fist enthusiastically into the air, “Yeah! I love a yo-yo.” She had won a small collection of things: a small toy airplane, a cheap-looking plastic yo-yo, and a very ugly purple t-shirt with the ‘AutoMechtechnic’s Virtual Escape Rooms’ logo across the front, which looked several sizes too big. She admires the yo-yo and admits, “Though, I’ve been trying for the kazoo for about a decade.”

“Anyway,” the Doctor pockets the toys and slings the t-shirt over her shoulder, “Thanks for the game!” She gives the old, decaying robot a faithful pat on the head before starting to walk. The others follow. 

As they walk, Ryan asks, “Any other horror movie adventures today?”

“Just because it wasn’t shiny, doesn’t mean it was useless.” the Doctor brandishes her toy aircraft, “Plus, it all works. Just needs a bit of T-L-C.”

Yaz interjects, “He’s just sour because he didn’t get a bigger toy. Graham’s not complaining.”

Graham was actually very pleased with his kazoo, and was holding it between his teeth as they wandered through the rows of ramshackle carnival games. He blew a brief  _ zzooo _ as Yaz made her point.

“Bah, Graham should be happy he’s not still stuck in game,” Ryan jests, playfully giving his step-grandfather a nudge, “I did do  _ five _ rooms.”

“So? The Doctor did a hundred times what you did, she’s perfectly happy with her christmas cracker tat.”

“Alright, enough you two,” the Doctor finally says. She brandishes her sonic, “Want to see if the bumper-cars are up to snuff?”

Graham rubbed his hands together, “Now you’re talking my language!” 

As Yaz collected hers, Ryan’s, and the Doctor’s VR prizes and stuffed them into her rucksack for safekeeping (Graham refused to give up his kazoo, sticking it in his pocket and insisting he would treat them all to a ballad later), the group came upon the decaying pavilion, littered with spherical vehicles. The ‘cars’ looked more like metal Christmas tree decorations surrounded by a rubber inner tube than imitation cars, but beneath the rust-eaten shells and heavy layer of purple dust, each was its own recognizable bright color. 

“Dibs on red,” Ryan called, and walked over to the red car, awkwardly climbing in and adjusting his too-long legs. Yaz and Graham started to make their way to their own cars as the Doctor pried open the mechanical operator’s box at the ride entrance, and started to use her sonic to convince it to power on.

The colorful lights of the pavilion blink on, and the venue starts to fill with the  _ clicks  _ and  _ clonks _ of the machinery coming to life. The car Ryan is in trembles and then lurches forward unexpectedly. “Whoa,” he says, grabbing the cartoonish steering wheel. The car lurches again, violently, and rocks from side to side. He knocks against the walls of the ride as he hollers, “Hey-hey-hey!” 

Graham is standing a couple of cars away, and watches as Ryan’s car starts to jerk several inches in every direction, “Doc! Hey, Doc, kill the ride, it’s broken!” He points to his grandson with one hand as he waves at the Doctor, still at the ride’s entrance, with the other. Yaz stops her forward progress into getting into the car, and climbs back out as she keeps her eyes on Ryan. 

The Doctor scrunches her eyebrows together and wields her sonic screwdriver over the control panel. She hollers back, “That’s not me, nothing’s started yet!” 

As she finishes her last word, there is a high groaning sound of metal under a strain, and a section of Ryan’s car suddenly crunches down into itself, like an aluminum can. He screams again, “Whoa!” and fights to stand up in the seat as the car bucks and jerks from side to side, another section imploding. The Doctor, Graham, and Yaz make a unspoken dash towards him; the car continues to dent and shrink and wrinkle, as if by a giant invisible hand, and Ryan leaps from the seat of the ride, landing ungracefully on the concrete beside the vehicle. Yaz is nearest to him and helps him to his feet as the car takes several more seconds to fold up and self-destruct, finally falling still once all that remains is a ball of twisted metal, nearly half the size of when it started. 

The group stands speechless for a moment once it stops, before Ryan, wide-eyed and still catching his breath, threw a hand in the air, “Now what on earth was that?!” he leans around Yaz so the Doctor had a clear look at the somewhat-accusatory expression on his face. 

Before she can respond, another car--a green one--suddenly lurches towards them about a meter. They all take a step back; it shudders and lurches again another meter. “Er, I think that’s the end of our day at the carnival,” the Doctor says, starting to walk backwards with her arms extended, herding her friends behind her as the car starts moving, scraping against the concrete as it starts picking up speed. They all wordlessly agree. In synchrony, they all turn and start to sprint, the sound of the car chasing them dying as it smacks into the guardrail surrounding the bumper car pavilion. 

They keep running regardless, until they reach what must have been analogous to a Merry-Go-Round, but instead of horses, the ride was composed of ornate metal sculptures of an unfamiliar animal, stocky and three-legged. The ride was even more unnerving, as the rust and disrepair made the animals look like they were melting and suffering in their stationary positions. Graham leans forward as he tries to catch his breath, “Alright, Doc, alien bumper cars are a little more heavy handed than I’m used to.”

“It was almost like it was possessed,” Yaz added, smoothing her fly-away hairs into her braid. 

“It was certainly bizarre,” the Doctor admitted, looking back into the distance, at the barely visible peak of the bumper car pavilion. 

“Bizarre? I almost ended up in a recycling bin.” Ryan huffed, “I--”

The Doctor raised a hand and motioned for him to be quiet, she continued to look back at the offending attraction, squinting against the purplish haze the dust created. She muttered, “I don’t think we’re alone.” She fishes her sonic out of her pocket and passes it over the space in front of her. Glancing at the diagnostics, “Hmm...unknown.”

She lowers the tool and runs her tongue uncertainly over her lower lip. She then calls out into the ether, “Hello, there! Can you hear me? Can you come out, please?” 

After a tense ten seconds or so of the group staring expectantly at the hazy, dilapidated arena of broken games and rides, something started to move from behind one of the booths…

It’s a child...sort of, or at least whatever it was, it had a round-ish face and awkward lanky limbs like an adolescent does, in the throes of transition from babe to adulthood. She’s shorter than all of them by over a head, dressed in a toga of earth-coloured linens, barefoot. She is a grey-brown colour, and covered in quills. The quills are the lengths of fingers, and cover the creature in a pattern similar to that of hair--her head, the back of her neck, her arms and legs, but spare her face, the palms of her hands, and her feet. On her hands and feet are four long digits each, and each of those sports a sharp, orange talon-like nail. Her eyes are small, and pale-orange, and dart back and forth inquisitively. Her mouth is set in a hard line, hiding binary rows of blunt, pale-orange teeth. 

She walks closer until she is about five meters away, where she stops and continues to silently look from person to person. 

The Doctor addresses her, “Hiya. I’m the Doctor, this is Graham, Yaz, and Ryan back there. We were just exploring your amazing set up.” The creature just continues to look at them. She’s not necessarily staring, but she takes paced glances of each face, no expression, no inclination of understanding or concern. The Doctor pauses for a second, but when it’s clear they are at some sort of awkward stalemate, she adds with a little smirk, “I mean, could do with a visitor’s center. You know, maps, coupons...a place to buy a fizzy drink…And you might want to get a maintenance man in to see to some of your rides. They’re all quite dusty, and one in particular is a touch homicidal.” 

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” Yaz speaks up. 

The creature suddenly inclines her head, as if surprised. She speaks, in a quiet almost-purr, “Carric.” 

“Pleasure,” Graham interjects, still uneasy as could be. 

“You live here, Carric?” The Doctor asks.

Carric looks to the Doctor when she answers, “This is my home.” Beside them, the carousel suddenly creaks, groans against its rusted parts, and turns half a revolution. Graham, Ryan, and Yaz jump a little and give the attraction nervous sideways glances, but the Doctor doesn’t take her eyes off the young creature in front of her.

“You weren’t part of the Apalacha colony, were you? The ones who’ve gone?” the Doctor asks, leaning forward in interest. 

“I am Wyndorvian.” The carousel turned again.

The Doctor looks between Carric and the carousel. “Do you have telekinetic abilities? I’ve not heard of your species before.” While the Doctor admired the concept of the unknown, she was wildly unaccustomed to suffering from it. 

“Only towards metal,” Carric answered, and the carousel made a noisy, full revolution, “A nearly pointless ability before the humans came and brought it all with them.” 

“Did you have anything to do with the bumper car accident that just happened, Carric?” The Doctor’s tone shifted ever so slightly, from guarded to defensive. 

Carric did not answer. 

“Where’s the rest of your people? I’ve been here a number of times since the colonists left, I’ve never met your kind.” 

“You’re not human.” Carric said simply. “You never interested me before.” She looks from Graham to Ryan to Yaz, her tone remained unchanged but Yaz could swear her eyes were becoming a deeper orange, the carousel was picking up speed beside them, “Today, you brought humans.”

The Doctor unconsciously inched her way between Yaz and the cold stare Carric was giving her. She asks again, “Where’s your family?” 

“They killed them. First, for fear; then, for fun. We had never seen metal before, we didn’t know...” the creature says, “The humans thought we were attacking them, but it was often just accidents. Even after we learned how to control the ability, the slaughter of my species became a sport,” As she speaks, the roof of the carousel abruptly sinks, the support post in the middle bends and the ride begins to fold in on itself. “The humans came, and destroyed everything. They built their cities, had their fun. And they took our lives.” 

Suddenly, Yaz gasps. Her hands go to her throat and she takes a shaky step back. 

“Yaz!” Graham is closest to her, and grabs her arm to support her. His young friend hacks and coughs and claws at her own neck. Graham can see the silver chained necklace she was wearing had gone taught--twisted and was tightening around her throat. He immediately tries to untwist it to relieve some of the pressure as she starts to choke. 

“Carric, stop it now! She’s done nothing!” the Doctor wheels around and panickedly points the sonic which was still in her hands at Yaz. The clasp of the necklace comes undone, and Graham yanks the jewelry away. As Yaz coughs and rubs her throat in relief, the Doctor turns back to the creature, “These people are innocent.”

“So were mine,” the mounds of tangled metal scrap around her quiver and crunch, the carousel curls up into a giant ball of shrapnel. Bits of metal start to swirl around them in the air.

The Doctor spins on her heels, herding the others, “Run!” 

They all take off and start to sprint, ducking and swerving as shrapnel and mechanical parts start zinging past, imbedding themselves into nearby structures. 

“Split up, get to the woods,” the Doctor directs, “I’ll try to slow her down.”

“The TARDIS is the other direction!” Graham argues. 

They are hailed with aluminum darts from one of the games, which rain down and bury themselves in the ground as they run.

“In the heart of an industrial city,” the Doctor explains, “Get to the woods, away from where she has ammunition she can telekinetically crush you with. We’ll lose her and then double back for the ship.”

The three obediently continue forward, and the Doctor skidded to a halt and turned around. She found her way back to Carric, who was simply walking between the rows of decomposing carnival games. 

“Over here!” the Doctor calls and waves her arms, trying to get the creature to give chase between two booths. 

Carric pauses, looks down the alleyway, and calmly states, “You’re not human, you do not interest me.”

“Oh, come on. My people weren’t exactly saints either. Give me a go!” she urges. 

The roundish young face simply looks a little annoyed, she waves a quilled hand lazily, and the infrastructure of the booths in front of the Doctor collapses. The Doctor instinctively ducks down, but once the noise settles, she is left facing a heap of collapsed carnival stalls blocking her way forward, and no Carric in sight. 

She turns and starts running the other way…

==========================

The Doctor, having lost track of everyone, found a bit of scaffolding partially surrounding an unfinished building, and scaled it. She scans the remains of the carnival, the surrounding buildings, and the empty field beyond it that led to the small forest of dense, purple-tinted trees. The field is bathed in light and tall golden grass. On the grass she spots the seemingly-floating torsos of her friends, separated by at least fifty meters a piece, sprinting for the treeline.

Her heart sank as he hit the ground. In the periphery of her vision, Yaz to one side and Graham to the other, they disappeared into the forest, slipping between the trees and foliage at surprisingly the same pace. But equidistant from them, right in the middle, the Doctor watched Ryan stumble. Perhaps over uneven ground, perhaps over his own two treacherous feet, but he tripped and he fell and she watched as the waist-high grass seemingly swallowed him whole. 

He rolled and scrambled with his hands for anything to help him back to his feet. The Doctor could see Carric, like a predator singling out the lame from a herd, start to approach him.

The Doctor leapt from her vantage point and began to sprint towards them. 

Carric is quiet, and deliberate, advancing almost slowly. Ryan doesn’t turn to look behind him because he knows she’s there, and instead clambers to his feet. Once he’s there, he doesn’t run, he doesn’t even bother to squat down behind the tall grass for cover. Instead, he stands and, still facing the treeline only thirty meters away, takes a deep breath. 

Carric was a little more than a dozen meters away from him when she slowly raises her arm, the motion coinciding with the appearance of a length of bar of metal levitating menacingly in front of her, parallel with the ground; from a distance it looked something akin to an nocked arrow. 

As Ryan turns and he recognizes the scene in front of him, the familiar grey-blue blur of the Doctor skids to a stop in between him and his would-be hunter. The Doctor is facing Carric, so he can’t see her face, but he can hear the serious, almost-parent-like rebuke in her voice as she quietly says over her shoulder, “Keep going, Ryan.” He felt like a child who had been caught out of bed at night, “Do as you’re told.”

She is an arm’s length in front of him, and blocks out the view of Carric completely. 

Ryan had never been any sort of clairvoyant in any other aspect of life, but in this instant, he didn’t budge. Something deep and sharp inside his gut had him anchored to the spot; he had to stay. He mutters, “No.”

“I’ll handle this--”

“Doctor,” Ryan pleads.

“Ryan, go. Now. I need you safe.” She takes a small step towards Carric, who had stopped advancing. 

“Stand aside. You do not interest me.” Carric says, squinting her eyes. There was something dangerous about how she had stopped approaching, how she was simply stood there without a menacing grin or evil laugh or mastermind fury. She was calm and she was indifferent, and it was scary. Like a country plain before a cyclone touched down. 

The Doctor holds her ground, “I can’t let you hurt them.” Staring down the blunt, rusted end of the levitating metal pipe, to Carric’s defeated, empty gaze, the Doctor would not move. She was between them, exactly where she was meant to be. It was simple. Over here is what was hers, and over there was the threat, and she would not move. There was once upon a time, where she wasn’t between them, and it had cost her Bill. She refused to pay that price again.

The spines framing Carric’s face stand a little more erect as she growls, “Humans are a wicked thing, I will stop their savagery.”

“Listen to me. You can’t control other peoples’ actions,” the Doctor implored, “And believe me, sometimes I wish you could. What you  _ can  _ control are your own reactions. We are responsible for how we respond to adversity,” she dared to inch a half-step closer, “I’m sorry the humans you knew did what they did. You have every right to be angry. What you don’t have,” she squared her stance, “is the right to be cruel.

“Please, Carric, hurting them, it’s not justice. You’re letting hatred beget hatred, and it won’t make you feel better.”

They stare tensely at each other. The wind moves through the far-away trees, brings the Doctor’s blonde locks around her face, and the golden grass bows a little. Despite the Doctor’s terse baby-steps forward as she spoke, they still are seven or eight meters apart. Carric stands with her fists clenched by her sides, her head slightly inclined in thought, the rusted metal bar still floating gently and menacingly in front of her. 

The Doctor opens her mouth to speak, but is immediately cut off. Carric hums, “I don’t want to feel better.” 

And then she feels suddenly like she’s been punched. The Doctor accidentally makes a strange noise--not one of pain or despair, but rather surprise. At least, she thinks she’s made a noise. She did not hear the noise herself, only felt the air leave her body, as everything was drowned out by the roar of the breeze in her ears. It was the same pleasant, placid breeze that had been blowing all day, but suddenly it was deafening, overbearing, overpowering, pushing her back a step, pushing her down so that she sinks beneath the horizon of the grass. 

The sound of the breeze is drowned out by a loud buzzing, and Ryan’s scream. He might have been screaming words, but their definition was lost to her. She can’t see him, and she can’t see Carric, she can only see the golden reeds of grass reach and stretch up around her as she drops first to one knee, and then she finds herself folding; folding in and down and smaller, like how a newspaper could become a crane or a boat or a hat, she folds. She’s taken on a shape she’s never been before, and it’s strange because she did not think she would ever become two-dimensional but with how close the roots of the grass were now to her face, she could only assume she had become like the Boneless, a matter of scenery. 

She stays like that for nearly an entire second, flat and elsewhere. And then she inhales. 

Reality crashes back down around her in heavy, drowning waves.  _ I don’t want to feel better _ , Carric had said, and flicked her wrist; the enchanted metal bar shot forward and pierced through the Doctor’s middle, just below her last ribs. The Doctor’s hands had come up automatically and wrapped around the end of the bar where it protruded from her body. She falls to her knees and Carric attempts to manipulate the metal weapon to continue through and pierce Ryan as well, but the Doctor does not yeild her grip, and sinks all the way to the ground with it. Carric sighs, annoyed and now weaponless, but starts walking calmly towards Ryan, shuffling by the body of the fallen woman, still clinging to the bar so that Carric could not reuse it. Ryan looks to the part in the grass the Doctor’s body had disappeared into, and then to the approaching creature. He screams, wordlessly, in anguish and in fear, and he has no choice but to turn and run the other way.

The Doctor trembles as she clutches the bar, now unnecessarily as Carric disappears into the woods, forgetting her and following her friends. She feels an alarming warmth start to spread underneath her, and she shivers. The grass sways above, like a lullaby. She involuntarily shuts her eyes... 

==========================

Ryan can’t be sure where Carric ended up, only that he was ninety-nine percent sure she wasn’t following him anymore. He runs in a daze, in circles and spirals, just like his mind and his gut. He felt simultaneously ill and numb; was the Doctor alive? Did Yaz or Graham see what happened? Was she still alone? 

He had to go back. 

And he does. He turns and does his best to orient himself back out of the woods and towards where the Doctor fell. It takes him, if he had to guess, about an hour to make it back to the meadow. The light of the day is changing, becoming softer as the evening draws closer, and the gold of the grass shimmers like a liquid. Coming upon the clearing, Ryan finds himself squatting and awkwardly walking like a duck through the reeds, just in case Carric was near. 

Ryan finds the Doctor. He is not relieved. He’s not immediately sure if she’s alive. She’d laid in the dirt, curled up on her side, curled around the length of metal she’d been impaled with, her hair covering her face. The small amount of golden grass that had been flattened beneath her was dark and wet. Ryan is scared to touch her.

He whispers as loudly as possible, “Doctor? Doctor, can you hear me?” but she doesn’t stir. He can see that she’s breathing, but he still grabs her wrist and feels for the thrum of a pulse. She’s cool to the touch, and he wonders if she’s normally that temperature. “Doctor, please. I--I don’t know what to do.” 

It occurs to Ryan that he is clueless. Where could he go? Could he carry her? Where were the others? What happened when night fell? He contemplates just staying there, knelt beside her until either she awoke, Yaz and Graham resurfaced, or Carric doubled back and killed him. He can’t stay there. Could he take her to the TARDIS? He had a suspicion that Carric was lying in wait amongst the metal city, knowing that their ship was sat in the center of the main road. 

He needed to find Yaz and Graham, but he could not leave the Doctor. 

“Doctor, I...I’m gonna lift you, alright? I’m gonna be as careful as I can.” He says tentatively, as if she might spring up and give him permission, which she doesn’t.

He moves slowly, maneuvering her first into a semi-seated position, and then fully into his arms. He doesn’t touch the metal bar, doesn’t even really look at it, even though once she’s in his grasp it sticks up almost level with his nose. 

She doesn’t move or make a sound, but her face is tense and unrestful. Ryan looks down at her, pale and uncomfortable, and holds back tears as he starts to stagger towards the trees. 

==========================

“I feel a little silly,” Yaz admits, looking down at the schematic she had drawn in the dirt. 

“It’s a brilliant plan,” Graham encourages. 

“Sure, but the Doctor has probably already stopped Carric. I’m just wasting our time.” she says sheepishly. She and Graham had found each other nearly an hour prior when they both stumbled upon opposite ends of a cemetery, obviously built by the human colonists judging from the headstones and religious idols. They had settled on taking shelter, though quite macabre, in one of the small concrete mausoleums, figuring they would be able to hear anyone approaching. The structure was bare, overrun with weeds and dirt, and in dire need of some caretaking. As they waited, Yaz revealed her own little plan to stop Carric that she had thought of while running for her life. 

“Still an excellent idea. I especially like my role.” 

Before they could continue, the soft crunch of slow-approaching steps starts growing louder. Yaz immediately starts to stand, but Graham grabs her forearm. She hisses, “It could be the Doctor, or Ryan.” 

“Or it could not be,” he whispers back, “Be careful.” He would be the first to admit that Yaz was quite clever, but her quick thinking could sometimes lead to too-hasty decisions. 

She set her mouth in a hard line, but conceded and made her way to her feet much more slowly, keeping crouched and near the wall of the mausoleum as she tip-toed towards the door. 

The shuffling noise comes to a halt as Yaz peers through the crack of the wooden mausoleum doors. She scans the cemetery by the inch by inch she could. Behind her, Graham whispers anxiously, “Anything?”

It was shabby headstone after headstone, “I don’t...” Yaz pauses.  _ There _ . Just beyond the steps of the crypt, Ryan was standing, drenched in sweat and heaving to catch his breath, looking nervously around the cemetery. “Oh, my god,” Yaz mouth goes dry, because in Ryan’s arms is the body of the Doctor. 

Yaz flings the heavy door of the mausoleum open and flits down the steps, Graham follows. 

Ryan initially jumped at the sound of the crypt door swinging open, but his shoulders sag in relief as he recognized Yaz and Graham emerge, he exhales, “Oh, thank goodness.” 

“What happened?” Graham asks when Yaz falls speechless. 

“I--she--” he struggles to answer. 

Yaz’s hand comes up to cover her mouth as she starts to understand what’s in front of her. 

Ryan stands awkwardly with a wide stance, hunched forward and stiff, he trembles a little, and he cradles the Doctor close; the Doctor is pale, her jaw set and face locked in an unconscious grimace, and jutting from her belly is a two-foot metal rod. Her hands are relaxed, but still loosely wrapped around the rod where it meets her body, in such a way that it takes several seconds for Yas to realize it was stuck in her instead of just being held there. 

Graham is the one to make the next decision, “Get inside, now.” He gestures to the mausoleum and starts leading them inside. It takes a second for Ryan to start walking again, he’s exhausted and sore, all of him aches, and he staggers under the weight of his friend. Eventually, he teeters inside.

The floor of the mausoleum is filthy; decades of dust and dirt laid thick, only disturbed where Yaz and Graham had been sitting earlier, but Ryan has no choice, and with the help of the others he lays the Doctor down. It takes minutes, as his muscles are locked, curled around her for the past hour, and Yaz and Graham find themselves manually moving his arms for him. They’re careful, mindful of the metal bar and how they oriented the Doctor on the concrete. Graham has the foresight to work her arms out of the sleeves of her coat before they lay her down. Yaz lifts the back of her shirt, relieved that the rod does not transverse all the way through her, but it came close; while the rod does not stick out from the woman’s back, the Doctor’s right flank was covered in a inky black bruise, surreal to the point that it looks like the Doctor had leaned in paint.

They lay her on top of her coat. 

Ryan finds his voice, “She was protecting me.” He looks devastated. 

She’s soaked in blood, so is Ryan. The dark material of her shirt hides it well. 

Yaz tears through her rucksack and produces the purple t-shirt the Doctor has won earlier during the virtual reality game. She swallows hard and tentatively wraps the shirt around bar, pressing it lightly to the Doctor’s abdomen. The Doctor makes a small noise. 

“Doc, you hear me?” Graham tried immediately. She doesn’t respond. He looks to Yaz and Ryan, “What now?”

==========================

Night comes before the Doctor wakes. Her companions sit in a ring around where her body lays, taking unspoken turns holding her hand. 

When she opens her eyes, the sky is closer than before. Closer? No, that wasn’t right... _ Darker. _ It was nighttime, and it was darker. The mausoleum is dark, but not pitch black, the stars in the sky are near and bright, and bathe the moon in pale light, still distorted and purple from the dust that covers everything. 

She blinks dazedly against the purplish haze, and involuntarily groans. She’s cold and uncomfortable, laid too long on the concrete floor. Something just below her chest burns and pulls, heavy and keeping her from drawing a deep enough breath. It’s terrible. She lifts a leaden, uncooperative hand to find what was keeping her from breathing. A sudden heat engulfs the hand, moist and almost too warm. 

“No, no, be still,” it’s Yaz, come to life from staring at the floor and she catches the Doctor’s wandering hand in her own, keeping the Doctor from touching the bar. Yaz’s familiar face floats above her, joined by the floating, disembodied heads of Ryan and Graha, as Yaz reassures, “It’s alright.”

The Doctor looks from face to face, her breath quickening as she realizes how uncomfortable she actually is. She tries to swallow, the saliva thick and sticky, and she forces a half-smile, “You lot look awful.”

Graham drops his head in his hands in a brief wave of relief, and Ryan can’t help but chuckle. 

The Doctor manages to raise her head a little, and glance down, despite Yaz’s nervous attempt to keep her from doing so. “Ah,” the Doctor scoffs, “A souvenir.” She stares at the rod a moment, then looks around the crypt, “Where are we?” 

“A mausoleum.” Yaz answers. 

“Little preemptive as I am still breathing, but I appreciate the sentiment,” she jokes softly, lowering her head back down. Graham is the only one who chuckles appreciatively at the macabre humor. She squeezes her eyes shut and mutters, “Wow, tough crowd.”

“How are you cracking jokes right now?” Yaz asks sternly. 

Her voice is weak and her eyes are still closed tight, but she answers, “Thought it was dead funny.” 

Graham snorts again, earning a warning look from Yaz. 

The Doctor continues, now serious, “Yaz, can you remove it?” 

“Now you’re having a laugh,” Yaz rebukes.

“It’s okay,” the Doctor reassures, “It knocked one of my kidneys around, which is a shame because I really liked this set...but it didn’t do any catastrophic damage.”

“How do you know?” Ryan finally speaks up. 

“‘Cos I’m still me. Trust me,” she begs. The pressure the bar is creating is almost unbearable. It’s something other than pain, she feels like it’s crushing her from the inside out, and the minute movements it makes when she breathes scrapes at her organs.

The humans nervously look to one another, and eventually scoot in closer, kneeling around her. Yaz nods and stumbles through a set of directions, “Alright, er, I’m gonna...gonna pull the rod out. Graham will apply pressure once it’s out. Um, Ryan, you keep her still, yeah?”

The Doctor nods in approval and picks her head up once more. As Graham’s hands hover above the base of the bar she says in an accusing tone, “Is that my VR prize t-shirt?”

Yaz rolls her eyes and gets ready to grab the rod as she dismisses, “It was ugly, anyway, Doctor. On three, ready?”

Ryan gently presses her shoulders down, his face coming close, “Maybe don’t watch?” She had her moments of impermeability, where she was tough and unfazed and not bothered, but Ryan could see by the way she was flicking her eyes back and forth that this is not one of those moments. She was scared, and that was fine. 

She nods in quiet agreement, settling to look past him and stare at the ceiling. She hears Yaz, “Okay, one, two…” 

‘Three’ doesn’t come, instead Yaz grabs the bar and yanks it free from her body, Graham’s hands immediately scrunch the partially blood-saturated t-shirt against the now-open hole in the Doctor’s abdomen. The Doctor makes no noise or movement, but she goes from pale to grey, and her vision blinks out for a second or so. 

So must her hearing, because Yaz’s voice slowly evolves in her ears, overcoming a high-pitched ringing, “—to focus. It’s all over, look at me.” 

When she does blink and her vision comes back, Yaz is above her again, face still consumed in worry. She whispers shakily, “Ah, much better.” 

Yaz’s worry devolves into annoyance, and she discards the metal rod behind her somewhere with a loud clatter. 

The Doctor shudders, and forces, “Okay team, back to work. Anyone see where Carric went?” 

Ryan pats the Doctor’s shoulders in relief and sits back beside her head, “I think she’s in the city, waiting for us to try to get to the TARDIS.”

“Well that’s a shame, cos that’s where we need to get,” Graham interjects, nodding to the Doctor’s belly, still bleeding with disturbing warmth against his hands. He reluctantly applies more pressure, and she accidentally lets a groan slip. He looks at her sadly. 

She takes one of her own bloody hands and pats his arm with a strange fondness. It does anything but reassure him. The Doctor was not affectionate, at least not in commiserating touches or doting words, so when she pats his arm with her icy fingers, he feels panic.

Graham swallows hard, “Good thing Yaz has a plan.” 

The Doctor lay there, unmoving, her eyes closed, but still listening as Yaz described her plan. It was...good. It would work. 

Ryan readily agreed to the role Yaz offered him. It’s the first time the Doctor interrupts, “You’re sure, Ryan?” She doesn’t seem to realize how deep the question cuts, doesn’t occur to her that undermining his decision to distract Carric makes him feel inadequate, like he needed to be saved...again. He knows she doesn’t mean it like that, but still. 

“You became a kebab saving me earlier,” he answers, “My turn to play hero.”

She doesn’t argue or retort, just continues to lie there, eyes closed. She was pallid, but shiny with sweat. She shivered continuously, despite being wrapped in both her coat and Graham’s jumper. She was getting weaker, it was obvious. 

Yaz bites her lip, “Okay, let’s do it.” 

Ideally, they would wait until the sunrise, but with the Doctor’s condition insidiously worsening with each passing moment, the sense of urgency was becoming more and more palpable. 

==========================

When she opened her eyes again, Graham was a giant. Well, at least from her angle, Graham looked like a giant. 

She had a set of watery memories of being passed between Ryan and Graham as they took turns carrying her through the woods. She was somewhat grateful for being so disoriented, because being carried was absolute agony. And now Yaz and Ryan were gone, she could just sense it. She was laid on the ground, her head resting on Graham’s knee as they hid, concealed behind the counter of one of the carnival booths. Looking up at him, he looks as big as a building, and she snorts at the notion. 

The noise makes him aware that she was awake. He looks down at her and whispers, “Alright, Doc?”

She runs a sandpapery tongue over dehydration lips, and exhales, barely audible, “Others?”

He whispers back, “The kids are saving the day. The old coots are hiding. You and me are the old coots, by the way.” He is sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, leaning against the backboard of whatever game still stood, his arm extended and still lightly pressing the wad of cloth to her wound. 

There was a sudden sound of crashing and bending metal. Graham snaps his head up, but he can’t see over the counter of the booth, and he and the Doctor rely on the sounds of action to assume what is going on. 

There’s running feet against the dirt walkway, and Yaz’s voice, “Here-here-here!” More crashing. 

Ryan’s voice apperates, further away and echoing, “No, over here! Leave her alone, I’m over here!” Something heavy and metal collapses. 

A series of snapping noises. 

The keening of metal under strain. 

Ryan’s voice, “Yaz, watch it!”

From a similar direction, Yaz’s voice, “Now, Ryan!”

Several heavy clatters, and electrical zip-zip-zip, and an inhuman, pleasureless laugh. 

“It’s not working,” Ryan calls, and then there’s the sound of something softer than metal skipping across the ground. 

Graham eases the Doctor’s head down, moves her hand for her to take over where his was covering her wound, and starts to scramble to his feet. “Wait, Graham, help me up,” the Doctor orders unconvincingly. 

He’s on his knees as he shakes his head, “Stay put.”

She grabs his wrist before he rises, the meek grasp distracting him enough to look down at her look of desperation, “Graham. Get me up.”

It’s against his better judgement, but he much less gently hooks her arm over his shoulders and hauls her dead weight to her feet. For the first time that night, she makes a definitive scream of pain, drowned out by the screeching and garbled sounds of the carnival games being destroyed. 

Heaving for breath, supported almost completely by Graham, the Doctor looks over the booth counter. Ryan is nearby, on the ground, one of his arms pinned beneath an unrecognizable scrap of metal as he frantically tries to free himself. The majority of the booths are destroyed now, almost everything a gleaming tower of scraps. Beyond him, under the AutoMechTechnic’s Escape Rooms attraction sign, is the form of Carric. 

Carric is faced the other way, walking towards Yaz, who is trapped between two metal pillars. In the grey of the night, there is a nick in one of Yaz’s eyebrows, leaving a shiny dark train of blood running down her face as she fights against the squeezing pillars. 

Carric is wearing one of the VR simulation helmets—if all had gone to plan, Ryan would’ve have shoved it on her head as Yaz distracted her—she had tried to tug it off immediately after casting Ryan across the ground, but it yanked her quills painfully in the wrong direction. She left the helmet alone and instead turned her attention to crushing Yaz between the uprooted metal pillars. 

The Doctor tries to call out to Carric, to stop her, but she has no voice. 

The pillars moan and creak as they press even more together, making Yaz scream in between them. 

_Zzzzzzhhooooo_!! 

Carric gives pause and turns to see Graham, one hand pressing the Doctor to his side, one holding the Doctor’s arm in place over his shoulders, leaning sloppily over the counter of the booth with his little plastic kazoo clenched between his teeth. 

Carric sucks her teeth, annoyed, and turns towards Graham and the Doctor; behind her the pillars relax enough for Yaz to extract herself. 

The Doctor mutters, “See?” She weakly raises her free arm, “Couldn’t do that with a yo-yo .”

The sound of the sonic screwdriver in her hand is like music in her roaring ears. The lights on the simulation helmet Carric is wearing come on, and she freezes. Carric stops walking, her features going slack as the simulation turns on. Somewhere behind her from a pile of scrap, the disembodied voice of the game’s now-destroyed robot crackles, “Wel- _crrrr_ -come, compet-compet-competitor-or!”

Yaz shakily helps free Ryan, and helps him to his feet. He shakes his tingling, bruised arm, and immediately moves to pick up the Doctor, who was slowly inching closer and closer to the ground, despite Graham’s best efforts to keep her up. Once Ryan has the Doctor in his arms, Graham inspects Yaz’s eye, who with a blackening eye and swollen neck from earlier, looked like she’d lost a boxing match. She high-fives Graham regardless, “Flawless plan, right?” She smiles. 

They all throw weary glances toward Carric, who is stood frozen, staring blankly as she is lost in the virtual reality. After a somber moment, Graham gently urges, “She won’t be in there forever.” But nobody moves right away.

Ryan finally asks, “We all have that goofy look on our faces when we were playing?” 

“ _ You _ definitely did.” Yaz replies quickly.

There’s a beat and then everyone breaks into a laugh, even the Doctor, who chuckled painfully and quiet. 

As they start to shuffle out of the carnival, towards the TARDIS, the Doctor whispers jokingly, “I bet I could win the kazoo before she gets out.” 

Graham groans and takes her hand, presses his toy kazoo into her palm, “For the love of god, just have mine. And the next time we do a carnival, we’ll deal with the crowds.” 

She smiles and raises her eyebrows, her head rocking gently back and forth with Ryan’s steps. Yaz rubs her eyes in frustration as the Doctor asks Graham, “Did you just agree to a ‘next time’?”


	5. Of Hubris and Humility

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> NEWEST STORY: Ch 5
> 
> Yaz sometimes fails to think about the consequences of her actions. It's not that she feels invincible, it's just that she sees a someone in trouble, and it's her responsibility to help. 
> 
> The Fam are trying to answer a distress call when Yaz is gravely wounded playing hero. 
> 
> The summary stinks, I know, but that's the gist. Very heavy on the angst. TW: blood, violence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took longer to write than I meant. You’d think with the COVID precautions I’d have all the time in the world, but alas, having time apparently isn’t the problem, it’s my commitment to productivity haha. I really had some writer’s block on this one; I really, really enjoy writing these stories, but I’m afraid that they all are (or at least eventually will become) too similar, and I don’t want that to be the case. Anyway, I hope everyone is staying safe, and I hope y’all enjoy.
> 
> This one’s a little heavy on the angst. *TW* Also mentions acts of terror, if you are sensitive to the subject (it’s not the point of the story, but it’s there). 
> 
> Written from various characters’ points-of-view, but still third person (limited).
> 
> *Third person point of view, omniscient. The story is still about “he” or “she,” but the narrator has full access to the thoughts and experiences of all characters in the story.
> 
> Third person point of view, limited. The story is about “he” or “she.” This is the most common point of view in commercial fiction. The narrator is outside of the story and relating the experiences of a character.

Of Hubris and Humility 

**Third Person POV (omniscient)***

“Everybody loves a western!” the Doctor said excitedly. 

Graham gestures to his dungarees with some exasperation, “This ain’t exactly what I had in mind.”

She bounced from one side of the TARDIS console to the other, “It’s the westernmost settlement in this constellation! Helicast Two has a very strict caste system, designated by the color you wear. Visitors fall into ‘Business’, so we’re in green.” She tugged on the strap of her own green overalls with her thumb for effect. 

“Nothing screams ‘business’ like green dungarees,” Yaz mumbled and stuck her mobile phone in the chest pocket. The Doctor had used her sonic screwdriver this morning to ‘extend the cell service a bit’ --eyebrow waggle included-- on all their mobile phones so that they could stay in touch if needed. Yaz threw a glance to Ryan, who was still fiddling with the straps of his overalls, and nodded, “You look like a toddler.”

He  _ tutted _ unamused, shook his legs trying futilely to get the trousers to reach all the way to his boots, then nodded towards the Doctor, “Could be worse,”

Yaz would have to agree, this was the least flattering clothing they’d ever had to don for a mission: thick, baggy green overalls with arguably too many pockets worn over their normal clothes, and a dull, woven coat because it turned out, in the Doctor’s version of a ‘Western’, it was snowing. The Doctor has once again taken her own outfit to an extreme. Her trousers legs were rolled up to mid-shin, leaving several inches between the cuffs and the tops of her boots, she wore a pink jumper underneath with her unusual rainbow design, and on top of it all was her everyday grey coat, with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. They were meant to be responding to a distress call, and attempting to blend in; though the Doctor dressed like a thrift-shop reject was hardly convincing of a savior. 

“Okay, ground rules,” the Doctor announced, placing her hands on her hips, “Don’t wander off. Helicast is in the midst of its second civil dispute, the Yarkud War, and it’s not a pretty one, held between two of the indiginous clans. It turns out alright in a few decades, stopped by a man named Yarkud, actually. But people are pretty test-y around these days.”

“If it turns out alright, why answer a distress call?” Ryan interrupts. 

She gives an affirmative finger point, “ _ That, _ Ryan, is a long and involved answer. If it turns out alright, how do I know it wasn’t because we showed up?” She raised an eyebrow as if what she was saying was easy to unravel. 

Of all the times and trips and wonders, Ryan can confidently say he understood time travel the same today as he had when he first started traveling in the TARDIS. He shrugged, accepting her answer.

The Doctor continues, “Be vigilant. We find the source of the distress call, help where we can, and then we’re done.” 

“Why you being so cautious now, Doc?” Graham asks, “You’re usually a little more  _ blase.” _

“Insurgency wars tend to make me uneasy, Graham; call me finicky.”

“Fair enough.”

\-------------------------------------------------------------

**Yaz POV**

She knew the difference between right and wrong. 

The difference between  _ right _ and  _ smart _ was another matter entirely. Despite any commendations her superior officers back on earth might offer, Yasmin Khan was awful at following orders. 

_ There was one instance, when she first started, on her third or fourth shift as a probationer, she had been with Sergeant Sunder when he responded to a domestic dispute call. He had told her to wait in the car. And she did...for about thirty seconds, staring out the windscreen at the corner shop.  _

_ It was the middle of the day, but all the lights were off, and she could see the slightest hint of movement through the dim, advert-plastered windows. Her commanding officer stood in the halfway-in the doorway, hollering inside. PC Khan’s heart was in her mouth with anticipation, watching through the glass like a film was playing out. After a few minutes, Sunder’s form disappeared into the shop, the door closing behind him; this corresponded with movement from the side of the shop building--another door leading into the alleyway--opening, and a man appearing. He looks left, looks right, looks right at her. He turns and starts sprinting down the alley.  _

_ Yaz was out of the car and bolting after him without a thought.  _

_ He was faster, but as he ran out of alleyway, the corridor ending in brick walls several stories high, his speed didn’t matter. He halted, pacing viciously like a cornered animal as the young office closed in.  _

_ She let herself stop several meters away, “Hold it there!”  _

_ He stopped pacing, looking her up and down, and unsuredly raised a small gun she hadn’t noticed in his hand.  _

_ This was the first time PC Khan had seen a gun from this angle, barrel-first. She raised her hands in front of her and swallowed hard, “Look--”  _

_ The thundering footsteps behind her let her know that Sunder had caught up. He stepped up beside her, his extendable baton in hand, “Enough! Jeremy, enough,” he edged his way, half a step in front of his trainee, “You’re digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole here, Jeremy. Toss that away, let’s have a chat, eh?”  _

_ Just as quickly as it had escalated, it was over. The man-Jeremy-started crying, gently throwing his firearm to the side and sinking to his knees. Sunder nodded, “Good lad,” and leered at Yaz as he handcuffed the perpetrator, his tone nearly spitting, “And what were you thinking?!”  _

_ It didn’t occur to Yaz until he asked that she had done anything wrong.  _

_ The whole event had lasted maybe a minute and a half, the high of adrenaline and panic lasted much longer. She wasn’t ‘afraid’, that wasn’t the right word for it. There had been panic for sure, the sensation of the world disappearing from beneath her at the sight of the gun...but that sudden awareness of the need of survival didn’t translate to ‘fear’, rather a type of mania.  _

_ Actually, looking back now, after the Daleks, monsters, fangs, claws, poisons, wars, it was hard to believe that she had ever been worried. How could she ever heed a single bullet, when now she knew the universe had teeth? _

Anyway. Yasmin Khan was awful at following orders.

Which was undoubtedly why she was in the position she found herself currently in. She, the Doctor, Ryan and Graham had been on their way back to the village, to the TARDIS, after installing components of a teleport system at different corners of the refugee compound in an effort to get the dozens of civilians away from their persecutors, to the other side of the world where there was no warring. Then a band of extremists opened fire in the square as they went through. It started with a single, booming  _ crack! _ , followed by a nearby man dropping stark dead to the ground. 

What followed was pandemonium; the next  _ crack _ in the air was followed in quick succession by dozens more until the gunfire was deafening and constant. The people walking through the square scatter, screaming.

At first, the Doctor and her companions drop beside the lip of the ice-fountain in the center of the square they had been passing, but it was snowing, the whiteness making everything hazy and appear far-away, and the gunfire seemed multidirectional. The Doctor knows they are much too exposed where they are stooped so she orders, “Go, find cover! Be careful.”

They disperse obediently. 

Yaz and Graham initially end up taking shelter together, with a group of holy men behind a row of decorative columns. The Doctor and Ryan had disappeared, presumably hiding somewhere on the other side of the square. Yaz found herself darting from their hiding spot to a man lying in the street, yelling blindly for help. She hauled him to his feet and dragged him to safety. Two of the holy men took the wounded man from her, and Graham clapped her on the shoulder in congratulations, then scolded her for endangering herself. 

She opened her mouth to defend herself, when she was interrupted by an echo of terrified sobs. Both she and Graham looked back out into the street, and could make out a small figure laying underneath a wooden wagon, his tiny pink face contrasting against the quickly-accumulating snow. 

Yaz’s feet automatically move beneath her, lightly brushing Graham aside. He grabs at her frantically, but she slips through his fingers. 

She slid the last few steps, her limbs pulled in tight, turning herself into a ball, hugging her knees to her face, her center of gravity dropped close to the ground as she came to a halt crouched beside the wagon, trying to make herself as small as possible. 

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” she said gently and ridiculously as the bangs and screams of bloodshed continued behind her. She offered a hand to the child hiding beneath the wagon, curled so small he was easy to miss. He hesitated taking her hand, seemingly frozen with fear, a couple of thuds occurred overhead as several bullets embedded themselves into the hull of the wagon. He glanced between her and the group of his classmates he knew were hunkered behind a concrete fence, not a hundred meters away. 

Yaz tries again, “I’m a police officer,” if that meant anything to him, maybe this world didn’t have police, “I’ll get you to your friends. Come on, now, you can’t stay here.”

The child slowly took her hand and let her drag him from beneath his hiding spot. She held him close to her and smiled, “Good boy. Now, on the count of three, we’re gonna run to that fence, okay?” the boy gasped in horror, only highlighted by the  _ pings _ of ricocheting bullets off nearby wagons and mixed screams of the shooters and the wounded, but she firmly clasped his shoulders and emphasises, “We’re going to run to the fence, to where your teacher is, and we’re not gonna stop or turn around for any reason. Okay?” 

He nodded timidly. She patted him on the head and repeated, “Good boy. Alright, on three.” She took his little hand, “One...two...three!” She stood and took off at a breaking pace. 

There was virtually nothing between the broken down wagon and the concrete fence which was barricading thirty other children and their teacher behind it, other than a couple of bodies in the road that had been felled before Yaz and Graham had come upon the scene, the falling snow quickly burying them. No obstacles, but no shelter; only an upstream breeze and prayers that the shooters had terrible aim. 

She ended up tugging the child by the arm very hard on the first two strides, but after which he seemed to come to life and sprinted beside her, even pulled ahead a little. Had she not been running for both their lives, she might have been impressed. 

They almost made it.

When it happened, she  _ knew _ . It was hard to describe, the sounds she was hearing and the things she was feeling were two separate entities; experienced simultaneously but interpreted as each unique. Like smelling oranges, but tasting toothpaste, she thinks. Amongst the continuous  _ bangs _ and  _ cracks _ of bullets being buried in her surroundings—the road, the wagon, the distant buildings—there is one bang that she swears is hers. 

_ BANG, _ the sound reverberated through her and there was something white hot and heavy in her chest. 

The feeling was everything she was and wasn’t expecting. 

When Yaz fell, she fell hard;  _ BANG _ , heat, and her legs simply stopped beneath her, her top half continued on for a brief instant, carried by a combination of inertia and the force of the bullet, and she rolled bonelessly to the cobblestones, the soft new snow doing nothing to cushion her descent. 

The child’s hand slipped from hers and he did exactly what he was told—he didn’t stop. As soon as the warmth of his hand is gone from hers, he seems to evaporate. 

At first, it was just heat, intense but focused in one spot. Her panicked mind thinks someone’s holding a giant magnifying glass between her chest and the sun. She even swore she could see a tendril of smoke. But as she laid there, the strange kaleidoscopic view of the world that had overcome her slowly adjusted, corrected inch by inch until she could delineate the sky from the landscape. 

She couldn’t move. Everything, everything, everything was focused in her chest; all of her thoughts, her energy, her emotions, her attention all drilled down into that one smoking spot... nothing else existed. She then gasped and swallowed and took bites out of the air, trying to take a breath. The breath comes, but it may as well be water, and it leaks out somewhere between her mouth and her lungs. The precious air is lost more so as she unconsciously makes a muted whine in the back of her throat, continuous and gurgling with the saliva that starts pooling there, despite her gulping compulsively.

She laid there heavier than she’d ever been before, staring somewhere up towards the sky. She doesn’t know how long for, being crushed under nothing. She thinks it’s quite a long time. However little air she is getting is just enough to keep her cruelly conscious, but still starved for more. It reminds her of the feeling of trying to sleep with the covers pulled over her head as a child--eventually it’s too hot, the air is too gaunt and over-used--there’s the need to uncover her face.

\------------------------------------------------------------------

**Graham’s POV**

He felt ill, amongst other things. At first it was dread, as she slipped past him, making her way naturally towards the danger. That trepidation was undeniably mixed with pride as Yaz grabbed the child and started to run. Pride because Yaz was something other than brave...Yaz was intrepid. She wasn’t trying to be a hero, she was just trying to do the right thing. And he watched as it cost her dearly. 

He watched as she fell. An invisible force catches her, and forces her down, and he feels his insides leap and knot as she falls. He yells, “Yaz!” and unconsciously steps forward, only to be stopped by one of the clergy he is hiding with. The little boy, pale pink skin and pointed elvish ears, dressed in brown, simply glides away from her and sprints into his waiting teacher’s arms, and they duck out of sight. 

Graham finds himself on his knees, tugging and jerking unsuccessfully at the cleric’s grip on his arms, trapped and leaning around the pillar they’re behind, staring at Yaz’s body in the street. He can’t see her face, or if she’s even breathing, and he can’t go to her. He can only watch and wait until the gunfire abates. 

When it does, he’s the first of the dozens hiding to scramble from his cover. He slips and slides across the fresh snow, his heart pounding so hard he can feel the pulsations in his neck, until he drops gracelessly beside her, repeating, “Yaz? Yaz!”

Her eyes are open, but she doesn’t look at him. He takes her face in his hands, “Yaz, look at me, sweetheart.” 

She looks up at him with panicky, watery eyes. She’s too preoccupied fighting for air to speak, but she immediately grabs his arm, grips it tight. Graham claps his opposite hand over hers, “It’s okay, sweetheart, you’re okay.” 

Where she’s hurt isn’t immediately obvious because of all the clothes she’s wearing and the dusting of snow that’s settled over her, but Graham notes that she’s breathing a mile a minute, and she’s making a strange gurgling noise. 

He reluctantly brushes her hand off him, nodding to her coat as he tries to swallow the stone in his throat, “Hush, my dear. I’m just gonna take a look.” He tentatively takes the lapels of Yaz’s coat and moves them aside. 

Her shirt front and once-green dungarees are drenched in blood. 

Graham is speechless. He doesn’t wait to find the exact source of the bleeding before clapping one hand down on her chest, and his other hand pins her shoulder down as she manages a yelp and attempts to stop him. He shushes her half-heartedly, his mind racing through what to do next. The heat the bleeding creates against his palm makes his stomach churn, and he finds that he can’t pick one thought from another-- _ need help, need to get home, find the Doctor, find Ryan, stop the bleeding, need safety, keep breathing, don’t die, just wait, wait, waitwaitwaitwait. _

There is a soft  _ crunch-crunch _ of steps behind him, a shadow falls over them, and Graham risks a glance to see that it is one of the clerics--maybe the one that was holding him back, maybe not. Graham doesn’t know what to do other than somewhat plead, “She needs help.” 

The bald, freckled, pink head of the holy man bobs once, and he kneels opposite of Graham, on Yaz’s other side. He speaks in an impossibly deep, throaty voice for the first time, “May I?” He has an accent akin to what Graham could only compare to a native-spanish speaker. Graham nods, and reluctantly moves his hands away. 

The cleric  _ hmms _ unhappily as he leans in. He takes a handful of snow and wordlessly presses it onto where it looks like the blood is coming from. 

Yaz jumps and yelps again at the contact. The cleric says softly, “Shh, child. I must.” He replaces her coat lapels and looks at Graham with white-less eyes, consumed in brown iris, “We will go to the chancel.” 

“What, the church, you mean?” he rebukes, “She needs a hospital. We need the rest of our group!” 

“No sanitariums, not for us,” he tugs at his blue robes, “Medicine for Red Class only.” he makes to stand, to take Yaz in his arms. Graham, awash with emotions and racing thoughts, stops him.

“I’ll take her,” he says firmly. The cleric nods and does not question him. Graham, under different circumstances, had no business carrying anybody, but right now he just...needed to carry her. He crouches and whispers to her, “Yaz, I’m going to lift you, alright? Everything is gonna be okay.”

Her face contorts as he shimmies an arm beneath her shoulders, and she sacrifices some precious breath with a feeble scream. Graham continues regardless, muttering, “I know, I know. Almost there.” 

She buries her face in his shoulder once he stands. She’s heavy, and he shakes a little. He’s too focused on keeping her in his arms to look down and notice the grisly slurry of blood and snow she had been lying in. 

The cleric beckons him to follow. Graham glances around, frantically searching for Ryan and the Doctor, but only sees the square full of the pink-skinned locals, dressed in their various assigned colors, doing exactly what he was doing: actively mourning. 

He follows the holy man through the streets, maneuvering gently around who was left in the square, muttering reassurances into Yaz’s hair as they go. He’s slow, and it’s not long until, despite the weather, he’s sweating. Thankfully, they don’t walk far.

The church is only a few streets away from the square. It doesn’t look like a church. It’s more or less an amphitheatre, open to the sky, its stage and tiers of seats constructed out of humble wood. There are several local refugees scattered at random amongst the tiers, seemingly participating in individual worship, some of whom look up as the cleric enters the space, followed by Graham and a fading Yaz. There are other holy men, too, rounding around the theatre, who don’t bother to stop or pay notice to their fellow clergyman. 

The cleric wordlessly moves to the temple beyond the stage and leads them inside. Down a corridor they eventually reach what is either a small library, or a huge office. It’s surprisingly untidy, the walls packed from floor to ceiling in tattered scrolls and papers, there’s a couple of simple benches, and one big wooden table under the only window. The cleric snatches up the scrolls that litter the table, and nods to Graham. 

Graham, as gently as he could manage, eases Yaz down onto the table. He immediately flips open her coat and replaces his hand where the snow has melted. “Please,” Graham pleads to the cleric, “I--I don’t know how to help her. You don’t have a doctor or anything?”

The holy man’s impossibly big eyes look sad. He touches his thumb to Yaz’s forehead as he sighs, “I will go for supplies. I will ask for help.” He mimes a strange symbol above her eyebrow before he goes. 

As the door closes behind the cleric, and the room fills with the sounds of Yaz’s desperate panting, Graham begins to realize that the holy man might have simply provided Yaz with a quiet place to die. 

The realization does not get a chance to mature, because suddenly there is a muffled noise that gets louder and louder until Graham can make out...song lyrics? 

_ “--I've been to the year 3000 _

_ Not much has changed, but they lived underwater _

_ And your great-great-great-granddaughter _

_ Is doing fine, doing fine, oh--” _

It’s Yaz’s mobile phone! Graham awkwardly, and apologetically, fishes the phone from the front pocket of Yaz’s overalls with his free hand. The phone is dripping in her blood, and he has no choice but to run it across his trouser leg to clean it. A photo of Ryan grinning goofily is dancing across the screen and Graham manages to press the ‘answer’ icon. 

“Ryan?”

_ “Yaz?” _

“Ryan, can you hear me?”

_ “Oh, gramps? Hello?” _

“Ryan, are you okay?”

_ “Me, yeah, fine. Why you have Yaz’s phone?” _

Graham can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. “Is the Doctor with you?”

_ “I haven’t found her yet. This place is a mess--” _

“Okay, son, listen to me, come to the church. Ask someone for directions, just get here.”

There’s the briefest of pauses before Ryan’s voice drops an octave on the other end of the line, “ _ Graham, why do you have Yaz’s phone?” _

\-------------------------------------------------------------

**Yaz POV**

The pain wasn’t there anymore. It had kind of...slipped away, slipped away as the heat left her body. Yaz had learned in school that the concept of ‘cold’ was actually subjective. Following the laws of thermodynamics, one could not measure how ‘cold’ something was, but actually how much heat something was or wasn’t generating. Being ‘cold’ just meant a lesser amount of heat; and what was heat? Just a transfer of energy. Fitting. Because now the pain was gone, and so was the heat. The energy...gone… No energy, things were getting slower. In the deepest recesses of space, where there was no heat, there was no energy, and nothing moved. Everything was absolutely still… 

“Graham?” Yaz finally gurgles. She’d been trying to speak for the last several minutes. She blinks, fighting something stronger than sleep.

Graham is above her, at the head of the table, staunching the blood flow with one hand, futilely trying to ring the Doctor using Yaz’s phone with the other. He flip-flops back and forth between telling Yaz everything would be fine, and cursing at the phone as he repeatedly reached a ‘voicemailbox full’ recording.

He smacked the phone down a little too hard on the table, “Yaz, hey, sweetheart, just-just deep breaths.”

“Graham,” she whispers again. 

She’s interrupted by a huge clatter, the sound of something heavy against a wall, and a door banging open. “Graham!” 

It’s Ryan. His sweaty face appears above her beside Graham’s. He’s huffing for air from sprinting, “Yaz.” He murmurs, his eyes darting from her face to her body. 

Yaz uselessly mouths ‘hey’, trying to sequester more air for another word. Ryan rips off his coat and wads it up, pressing it overtop of Graham’s hand on her chest. She squeaks in surprise and Graham repositions his hands.

Yaz gulps, “Alright?”

Ryan presses a hand to his forehead, “Am  _ I _ alright, you nutter?” he looks up to his grandfather, “What happened?” 

Graham answers with a disapproving head shake, “We were stood behind this row of pillars waiting for the shooting to stop, and there was this kid stuck in the middle of the square. She just…”  _ Intrepid _ . 

Yaz watches their exchange, their upside-down faces floating above her, she feels guilty, “S-sorry.”

“Shut up,” Ryan said immediately, taking her hand as he and Graham continue talking. 

Graham said simultaneously, “You were brilliant, cockle.”

The older man then lowers his voice and says only to his grandson, “She’s bleeding pretty bad. We need the Doc.” 

“We were together, but she said she knew where the shooter was. Said she knew how to stop the gun they were using,” he rubs the back of his neck with his free hand, “She told me to stay hiding.” 

“She ain’t answering her phone,” Graham says, frustrated. 

Ryan’s hand tightens around Yaz’s wrist. He thinks for a second before offering, “What about the TARDIS? We can take her there.”

Graham abandons the mobile, opting instead to rest his hand on Yaz’s wild curly hair, loose from its plait, “I--I don’t know.” 

Yaz finds herself losing interest in their conversation. She doesn’t mean to, but her attention starts to diffuse, the men’s words lose their definition. Like watching the telly late at night, she blinks and suddenly chunks of the plot had passed…

…“Yaz!” Ryan is yelling, his face suddenly spanning her vision. She blinks as he orders, “Stay awake.”

She tries to tell him she can’t help it. Tries to tell him it’s getting even harder to breathe, her chest is heavy and empty, and she knows her breaths are getting faster and louder. She’s interrupted by the scraping sound of the door opening again. She can’t raise her head to see, but she can hear the cleric’s voice as he enters, “I have brought help. I have found a healer.” 

There’s another noise, Yaz assumes it's the cleric stepping to one side and holding open the door. She still can’t seem to raise her head. 

Yaz notices Graham stand up a little straighter and he yells towards whoever entered the room, “Where the hell have you been?”

\-------------------------------------------------------------

**Ryan’s POV**

The Doctor bounds into the room. Her clothes are spattered with purplish oil, and it’s smeared on her face as well. She looks windblown and wild. Her mouth drops open as she takes in the scene. It occurs to Ryan that she didn’t know it was Yaz...

“Yaz?” the Doctor mutters in disbelief. Ryan wasn’t used to seeing the Doctor struggle to comprehend something, but that’s what it looks like she’s doing. She recovers quickly, though, and strides towards them, demanding, “What happened?” She more or less nudges Graham a little out of the way.

“We were taking cover, but there were still people in the street. She ran out and grabbed a bloke who was hurt and dragged him back, and then there was this kid trapped under a cart. She went to get him too, but they got her in the chest.” Graham rambled. 

As he answers, the Doctor’s expression darkens. Her head bows a little and she clenches her jaw. She looks...furious. She wordlessly places a hand over Graham’s where it’s pressing on Yaz’s chest and lifts it away. She inspects the bullethole. 

Ryan doesn’t want to, but he can’t stop himself. He leans in and looks down. There’s a gory, scooped-out hole an inch or so below her collarbone, nestled in the layers of clothes now saturated and stuck to her chest. He can’t see much else, but he feels his face get hot and his mouth go dry regardless. 

Yaz is the only one making noise, loud, wet breaths as she lays under the glares of her Fam. She glances from disembodied head to disembodied head, falling lastly on the Doctor, who had yet to meet her gaze.

The Doctor doesn’t speak, and it goes from uncomfortable to intimidating. She voicelessly unclips Yaz’s overalls and uses both hands to scrunch Yaz’s jumper and shirt up under her chin. Both Graham and Ryan glance uncomfortably at each other, but hold their ground. 

The wound looks like someone took a spoon or a melon baller to the young woman’s chest. It’s dark, and deep, and pulses a fresh wave of dark blood with every hungry inhale, flooding the field of view. The Doctor flits her sonic screwdriver above her fallen friend, the familiar  _ eeeeenn _ -ing noise momentarily superimposes Yaz’s breathing. 

The blonde is silent as she interprets the reading. The apex of the lung was damaged, causing a partial collapse.  _ Survivable. _ The hemorrhaging however...the bullet had torn through the right subclavian vein, a monster of a vessel--how the girl wasn’t dead was miraculous, and a credit to the cold temperature slowing blood loss, and Graham’s attempts to keep pressure on the wound.

Yaz mumbles, “Doctor?” 

The Doctor’s face is set in hard lines, and, to Graham and Ryan’s discomfort, she doesn’t answer, only stands, staring at the side of the device. 

“Doctor,” Yaz manages again, this time clearly, with pleading conviction. 

The Doctor exhales very slowly, and lets her arm drop by her side, finally casting her eye’s towards Yaz’s face. 

“ _ Ngh,  _ it’s okay,” the younger woman whispers, “Please, don’t be cross…” she has to pause to catch her breath, “I should’ve been more careful.” 

The blonde noticeably swallows, as if thinking how to respond. She looks at Yaz for another second, passes a glance towards Ryan and Graham, then says to the young police officer, “We need to sit you up for a second,” as she talks, she takes Graham’s wrist and places his hand over the entry wound, much to his dismay, “Try to slow your breathing. We’ll be quick about it.” 

The cleric, who had been respectfully observing, forgotten by the others, moved to assist without direction. He sets a small crate of supplies he had gathered beside the Doctor’s feet and took a place on the side of the table nearest the wall. The Doctor remained at the head of the table, Ryan and Graham shoulder to shoulder on the other side. Graham applied gentle pressure to the wound as the others roughly heave Yaz into a sitting position on the count of three. 

Yaz nearly faints, and though the others have her in a steady hold, the room spins in wild circles. She can hardly make out that Ryan is talking to her, hushing her, saying everything was going to be alright. The Doctor peels away Yaz’s coat, discarding it behind her carelessly, and, with the cleric’s help, wiggles Yaz’s arms out of the sleeves of her jumper and shirt, so they can be lifted over her head. Yaz shivers, now sat in just her sports bra and dungarees folded down to her navel, she can feel the icy air of the library lick at her skin. The shivering brings on new waves of pain. 

The Doctor presses a square of cloth into the neat circular hole--where the bullet had exited Yaz’s body--above and inside her right shoulder blade, making Yaz yelp and her vision wax and wane. 

They awkwardly lay her back down. Ryan wriggles out of his coat and lays it over her belly, trying to offer a little warmth. Unspoken tension starts to mount as the girl starts gasping,  _ really _ gasping for air. 

“Yaz,” the Doctor finally says her name, capturing her waning attention, “You’ve got a big vein that got ripped up, I need to sew it up.” 

Yaz blinks very slowly, trying to form thoughts. She sputters, “Wait,”

The Doctor leans in even closer, “You’re gonna go to sleep now, okay,” she places a hand on the side of Yaz’s face, first gently, then purposefully, “It’ll be easier to breathe when you wake up.” 

Yaz doesn’t have time to process, everything swirling about. “Sleep, no,” she whispers, “No, just wait,” but it’s too late. The Doctor’s cold fingers apply the slightest pressure, followed by a warm trickling sensation spreading outward through her scalp, like water over stones. Her eyes closed and she visibly relaxed. 

“Doctor,” Ryan reproached, watching unconsciousness take over his friend, “She didn’t want to sleep.”

The Doctor doesn’t look at him, only shuffles through the crate of supplies the cleric had brought, “And I don’t want her bleeding to death.” 

Ryan bites his tongue as she sets to work…

\-------------------------------------------------------------

**Third Person POV (omniscient)***

The Doctor is stood in the corridor, the door to the library cracked just enough for her to see inside. Ryan is sitting beside Yaz’s unconscious body, he has one of her hands in both of his, talking about work, his Youtube channel, how he still couldn’t do his laundry without dyeing something the wrong color--anything to keep the room from being quiet. The cleric is at her head, on his knees, repeatedly tracing a symbol on her furrowed forehead as he prays to his gods in silence. 

Graham is in the corridor, too. They had just finished tying off the blood vessels the bullet had destroyed, bringing the bleeding to an almost-halt, but had left the wounds open to drain as they needed. Additionally, the Doctor had ‘re-inflated’ Yaz’s damaged lung. It was nightmarish. She had them turn Yaz’s body on its side, and she had cut between two ribs with a small blade the cleric had provided, and then forced a hollowed bamboo-like chute, used by the clergy to blow out incense, between the ribs. There had been an audible  _ pop _ of the straw being forced through fascia, and then the soft  _ hiss  _ of escaping air. Yaz, unconscious as she was, seemed to relax, and started to take some deeper breaths. Ryan vomited. 

They rolled her carefully onto her back, mindful of the chute still in its place under her arm, and covered her in their coats. The cleric, with the Doctor’s permission, drops several drops of oil into Yaz’s mouth, the oil seeps into the dehydrated cracks on her tongue and lips, claiming the oil would soothe her soul. They all stand there for several tense, quiet minutes. The Doctor watches the blue color around Yaz’s lips from hypoxia start to recede, and she finally starts for the corridor. Graham follows. 

Graham eyes the woman, “Alright, Doc?”

She rolls her eyes.

“Listen, brilliant work back there, but,” he says quietly, “That wasn’t right, putting her to sleep like that--” 

“Was I meant to let her bleed to death?” she snaps.

“You know damn well what I mean,” Graham snaps back, then, dropping his voice, “She just saved two lives. And she was scared. You didn’t even look at her.” The Doctor’s shoulders sag a little as Graham continues, “You know she thinks the world of you. Imagine...imagine something happened, huh? And that was her last experience, you, her hero, too pissed off to be kind.”

The Doctor looks him in the eyes at that, she comes up on her toes as if she was going to run, or fight him. After a second or so, she rocks back on her heels, the motion making her shrink as she casts her eyes down. “You’re right,” she realizes that even while sewing Yaz back together, she wasn’t thinking of her friend, but instead of the albatross she had become to her attackers. Her fingers worked, but her mind strategized-- _ find the shooters, dismantle their weapons, punishment _ \--when instead she should have been thinking about Yaz.

Graham could see she was...defeated...and put a hand on her shoulder. The motion was brief, but mitigating. 

The moment is interrupted by the cleric coming out of the room. He nods respectfully, “It will be nighttime soon. I can arrange for you to sleep here.” 

“That’s very kind, but we must return to our ship,” the Doctor responds, “We can better treat our friend there, anyway. And that’s where I need to be to activate those transport mats.” She snapped her fingers at the long-forgotten mission.

“Transport mats?” the cleric asks.

“To get your people to safer clans, without having to cross the ocean.”

Graham interjects, “It’s what we were doing here in the first place.” 

“ _ Oi _ !” Ryan’s voice calls from the room, “ _ She’s waking up _ .”

The Doctor and Graham, as politely as they can, leave the cleric and file into the room. Yaz is just starting to turn her head from side to side, her face contorting with consciousness and what it would bring. 

“Relax, Yaz, it’s okay,” Ryan reassured, running his thumb across the back of her hand.

She blinks, groans, and rolls her eyes around trying to find something to bring into focus. 

Ryan eventually asks, “Can you hear me?”

She squints at him with one open eye, gives a pregnant pause, then asks in a dehydrated voice, “Who are you?”

Ryan freezes, panicked and he feels his heart stutter, until a tired but toothy grin comes across his friend’s face. “Hey!” he says indignantly, not appreciating her joke, “Very funny.”

Yaz whispers, still grinning a little, “Shoulda seen your face, mate.” she ends her sentence in a little cough, causing her to grimace. The Doctor wordlessly produces her stethoscope from one of her many pockets and starts listening to the girl’s breathing. While she does so, Graham taps on Ryan’s shoulder and motions for him to give the women some space. Ryan is reluctant, but understanding, and follows his grandfather to the other side of the room. 

Yaz, a bit sloppily, manages to move her hand over the Doctor’s where the older woman was pressing the bell of the stethoscope to her chest. The Doctor stops and looks up to meet Yaz’s gaze. 

The younger woman looks simply awful; pale, anemic skin spattered in dried flakes of blood even on her jaw and face, dark grey rings encircle her eyes, and her lips are dried and fissured. The Doctor looks at her with a muted expression, and mumbles, “How do you feel?”

A preposterous question. How did she feel? She felt terrible. She felt bone-chilled, she felt numb and exhausted in a way she’d never been before. She felt too weak to move, felt a sharp burning deep in her chest that radiated out in exaggerated spikes with every breath. She felt far away. And above all, she felt remorseful. She knew oddly little about the Doctor’s past, but enough to know that having to keep her from bleeding to death had to be traumatizing. Yaz gave a little headshake, “I’m sorry.”

“No,” the blonde responds, “This shouldn’t have happened. I shouldn’t have let this happen.”

Yaz shakes her head again, “Don’t you dare.” she doesn’t feel like she should have to say more. This was not the Doctor’s fault. Their adventures were dangerous sometimes. It was  _ supposed _ to be dangerous. Sometimes. They had all agreed months ago, when they first started travelling together, that the Doctor wouldn’t always be there to protect them, and that was okay. Guilt would only cheapen the sacrifice. Yaz says, “All what happened was supposed to, like always.” 

The Doctor presses her lips together in a hard line. She scans her young companion’s face. How old was Yaz? Not even twenty? Even scaled down in a human lifespan, she was just eclipsing childhood. But so insightful. She had such a balance between morality and judgement, it made her honorable. 

She looks at where Yaz’s hand is over hers, to the wad of gruesome cloths conglomerated to the wound above her bra, to the stern look the young woman was managing to cast. She sighs, “They make ‘em pretty tough in Sheffield, huh?”

Yaz grins again, “Sheffield steel.”

\-------------------------------------------------------------

**Third Person POV (omniscient)***

Graham, Ryan and the Doctor are in the throes of discussing how to return to the TARDIS when the cleric resurfaces, perhaps an hour later. He quietly comes through the door and nods to each of them respectfully, they all return the gesture. He clasps his hands in front of them and says, “I have brought assistance.”

“Mate, you’ve done so much already,” Ryan says.

The holy man, for the first time, smiles. It’s pleasant, and sends wrinkles beyond his forehead to his shiny, bald cranium, “They very much would like to help.” After he speaks, two women and two men, dressed in brown, file in. One of the men carried a plank of wood, about two meters long, and one of the women had a bundle of blankets in her arms. 

The group graciously accept the help. One of the women introduces herself as Icthma, the other doesn’t speak. The women take several minutes to wrap Yaz in the blankets. It’s strangely ritualistic, they move purposefully and symmetrically, wrapping in layers of colorful quilts. It occurs to Yaz as they work and the room goes silent, save for Icthma, who begins to hum, and the others in the room form a line against the wall, that this is some sort of ceremony. She watches them dazedly, and with a hint of wonder as they work. When they’re done, the men give the plank to the women and step away. The Doctor quietly steps forward and starts to help the women slide Yaz onto the plank. 

Yaz looks up at her expectantly, but no one is speaking yet, so she feels like staying silent is the right choice. The Doctor knowingly brushes two fingers across Yaz’s forehead, and her mind is suddenly filled with the Doctor’s words,  _ It’s a warrior’s rite. They mean to honor you. The men can’t touch you until the women are done. It is quite a praise. _

She is too distracted with the tickle of the telepathic message to notice that they have successfully transferred her from the table to the litter. 

The cleric steps forward, traces another symbol across her forehead. He nods when he’s done, “Travel safely.” 

Yaz whispers, “Thank you for your help.”

The two men finally step forward, along with Graham and Ryan, and between the four of them they lift the litter onto their shoulders. She weighs almost nothing this way. 

The Doctor leads the way, the women trail behind. They make their way down the corridor, and Icthma must be humming again, because the gentle tune buzzes in Yaz’s ears, getting louder and louder as they make for the door. Once they exit the temple, the setting sun is still quite bright casting off the new-fallen snow, and Yaz squints and turns her head to look out across the amphitheatre. The events of the day must finally be getting to her, because what she sees can’t be real. 

The amphitheatre is full of the local refugees, a hundred, maybe more, all dressed in brown, so many of them their pink faces blend into a sea. They’re all humming the same amiable tune Icthma had been, creating a reverberating chorus Yaz could feel in her chest. 

Yaz feels tears in her eyes. She is humbled, and the humming lulls her comfortingly, blocking out the painful sway of the litter with each step.

They carry her out of the church grounds, and a large chunk of the crowd follows them through the streets. She’s too weak to turn her head and see, but the song continues behind her until they reach the TARDIS.

At the doors of the familiar blue box, the two men transfer all of the weight of the litter to Graham and Ryan, and step away, not before they both eyeball the wooden box skeptically. 

The Doctor addresses Icthma as she unlocks the door, “I’ll activate the teleport mats in just a few minutes. Get your people out of here.”

Icthma bows her head graciously, “Thank you for helping us.” She turns to Yaz and gently places a hand on her face, “And thank you for saving my son.” 

All of their eyes grow wide and Graham nearly chokes, “Your son?”

“Yarkud, my youngest, was the boy you saved today. His teacher told me what happened. I will be forever grateful.” she runs a thumb affectionately across Yaz’s cheek.

Yaz isn’t sure what to say, if there’s  _ anything _ to say, so she just nods. 

They exchange a few more pleasantries, and then the group shuffles inside. 

The Doctor makes a beeline for the console, flipping the lever to activate the transport mats, then immediately launches the TARDIS into the vortex. 

Graham and Ryan set the littler down, and the Doctor kneels beside Yaz and starts unfolding the layers of blankets she was wrapped into. 

Yaz, looking up at her Fam above her, starts to nod off, finally feeling like she could inhale properly. As her eyes drift shut she hears Graham exclaim, “Wait,” clapping an excited hand on Ryan’s shoulder, “What the hell was her kid’s name?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyrics are from ^Year 3000- Jonas Brothers  
> (please don't come for me for referencing the Jonas Brothers haha. Mandip Gil sings a portion of it in an interview, and I just thought it was very fitting)
> 
> Comments, suggestions and constructive criticisms are always welcome!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and critiques are welcome. I apologize for any typos or mistakes.


End file.
